TEN 



SERMONS 

OF RELIGION, 



BY 



THEODORE PARKER, 

ii 

MINISTER OF THE TWENTY- EIGHTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH IN BOSTON. 



BOSTON: 
CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY. 

NEW YORK: 

CHARLES S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY, 

1853. 



Entered according to Act of Congress,, in the year 1S52, by 
THEODORE PARKER, 
the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



By Transfer 

D. U. Public Library 

AUG 8 - 1932 



CAMBRIDGE: 
METCALF AND COMPANY, 
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 



TO 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 

WITH 

ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS, 
AND 

WITH KINDLY AFFECTION FOR WHAT IN HI3I IS FAR NOBLER 
THAN GENIUS, 

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 

BY 

HIS FRIEND, 

THEODORE PARKER. 



PREFACE. 



I have often been asked by personal friends to publish 
a little volume of Sermons of Eeligion, which might 
come home to their business and bosoms in the joys and 
sorrows of their daily life. And nothing loth to do so 
without prompting, I have selected these which were 
originally part of a much longer course, and send them 
out, wishing that they may be serviceable in promoting 
the religious welfare of mankind on both sides of the 
ocean. They are not Occasional Sermons, like most of 
those I have lately published, which heavy emergencies 
pressed out of me ; but they have all, perhaps, caught a 
tinge from the events of the day when they were preached 
at first. For as a country girl makes her festal wreath of 
such blossoms as the fields offer at the time, — of violets 
and wind-flowers in the spring, of roses and water-lilies in 
summer, and in autumn of the fringed gentian and the 
aster, — so must it be with the sermons which a minister 
gathers up under serene or stormy skies. This local 
coloring from time and circumstances I am not desirous 
to wipe off; so the sad or joyous aspect of the day will 
be found still tinging these printed Sermons, as indeed it 



vi 



PREFACE. 



colored the faces and tinged the prayers of such as heard 
them first. 

Sometimes the reader will find the same fundamental 
idea reappearing under various forms, in several places 
of this book ; and may perhaps also see the reason there- 
of in the fact, that it is the primeval Rock on which the 
whole thing rests, and of necessity touches the heavens 
in the highest mountains, and, receiving thence, gives 
water to the deepest wells which bottom thereon. 

I believe there are great Truths in this book, — both those 
of a purely intellectual character, and those, much more 
important, which belong to other faculties nobler than 
the mere intellect ; truths, also, which men need, and, as 
I think, at this time greatly need. But I fear that I have 
not the artistic skill so to present these needful truths 
that a large body of men shall speedily welcome them ; 
perhaps not the attractive voice which can win its way 
through the commercial, political, and ecclesiastic noises 
of the time, and reach the ears of any multitude. 

Errors there must be also in this book. I wish they 
might be flailed out and blown away ; and shall not com- 
plain if it be done even by a rough wind, so that the 
precious Truths be left unbroke and clean after this win- 
nowing, as bread-stuff for to-day, or as seed-corn for 
seasons yet to come. 



August 24th. 1S52. 



CONTENTS. 



i. 

PAGE 

OF PIETY, AND THE RELATION THEREOF TO MANLY LIFE 3 

II. 

OF TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT 33 

III. 

OF JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE .... 66 

IY. 

OF LOYE AND THE AFFECTIONS 102 

V. 

OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL . . . 140 

VI. 

OF THE CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS . .187 

VII. 

OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF STRENGTH . 227 

VIII. 

OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF JOY . . 261 

IX. 

OF CONYENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS . . 314 

X. 

OF COMMUNION WITH GOD 366 



SERMONS. 



OF PIETY, AND THE RELATION THEREOF TO 
MANLY LIFE. 



THOU SHALT LOVE THE LORD THY GOD WITH ALL THY HEART, 
A>"D "WITH ALL THY SOUL, AND WITH ALL THY MIND. — Matt. 

xxii. 37. 

There are two things requisite for complete and 
perfect religion, — the love of God and the love of 
man ; one I will call Piety, the other Goodness. In 
their natural development they are not so sharply 
separated as this language would seem to imply ; 
for piety and goodness run into one another, so 
that you cannot tell where one begins and the 
other ends. But I will distinguish the two by their 
centre, where they are most unlike ; not by their 
circumference, where they meet and mingle. 

The part of man which is not body I will call 
the Spirit ; under that term including all the fac- 
ulties not sensual. Let me, for convenience' sake, 
distribute these faculties of the human spirit into 



4 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



four classes : the intellectual, — including the aes- 
thetic, — moral, affectional, and religious. Let 
Mind be the name of the intellectual faculty, — 
including the threefold mental powers, reason, im- 
agination, and understanding; Conscience shall be 
the short name for the moral, Heart for the affec- 
tional, and Soul for the religious faculties. 

I shall take it for granted that the great work of 
mankind on earth is to live a manly life, to use, 
develop, and enjoy every limb of the body, every 
faculty of the spirit, each in its just proportion, all 
in their proper place, duly coordinating what is 
merely personal, and for the present time, with 
what is universal and for ever. This being so, what 
place ought piety, the love of God, to hold in a 
manly life ? 

It seems to me, that piety lies at the basis of all 
manly excellence. It represents the universal ac- 
tion of man according to his nature. This univer- 
sal action, the bent of the whole man in his nor- 
mal direction, is the logical condition of any 
special action of man in a right direction, of any 
particular bent that way. If I have a universal 
idea of universal causality in my mind, I can then 
understand a special cause; but without that uni- 
versal idea of causality in my mind, patent or 
latent, I could not understand any particular cause 
whatever. My eye might see the fact of a man cut- 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



5 



ting down a tree, but my mind would comprehend 
onlv the conjunction in time and space, not their 
connection in causality. If you have not a uni- 
versal idea of beauty, you do not know that this is 
a handsome and that a homely dress ; you notice 
only the form and color, the texture and the fit, 
but see no relation to an ideal loveliness. If you 
have not a universal idea of the true, the just, the 
holy, you do not comprehend the odds betwixt a 
correct statement and a lie, between the deed of 
the priest and that of the good Samaritan, between 
the fidelity of Jesus and the falseness of Iscariot. 
This rule runs through all human nature. The 
universal is the logical condition of the generic, 
the special, and the particular, So the love of 
God, the universal object of the human spirit, is 
the logical condition of all manly life. 

This is clear, if you look at man acting in each 
of the four modes just spoken of, — intellectual, 
moral, affectional, and religious. 

The Mind contemplates God as manifested in 
truth ; for truth — in the wide meaning of the word 
including also a comprehension of the useful and 
the beautiful — is the universal category of intel- 
lectual cognition. To love God with the mind, 
is to love him as manifesting himself in the truth, 
or to the mind; it is to love truth, not for its uses, 
but for itself, because it is true, absolutely beauti- 
l * 



6 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



ful and lovely to the mind. In finite things we 
read the infinite truth, the absolute object of the 
mind. 

Love of truth is a great intellectual excellence ; 
but it is plain you must have the universal love of 
universal truth before you can have any special love 
for any particular truth whatsoever ; for in all intel- 
lectual affairs the universal is the logical condition 
of the special. 

Love of truth in general is the intellectual part 
of piety. We see at once that this lies at the 
basis of all intellectual excellence, — at love of 
truth in art, in science, in law, in common life. 
Without it you may love the convenience of truth 
in its various forms, useful or beautiful ; but that 
is quite different from loving truth itself. You 
often find men who love the uses of truth, but not 
truth ; they wish to have truth on their side, but 
not to be on the side of truth. When it does not 
serve their special and selfish turn, they are offend- 
ed, and Peter breaks out with his " I know not the 
man," and " the wisest, brightest " proves also the 
" meanest of mankind." 

The Conscience contemplates God as manifested 
in right, in justice; for right or justice is the uni- 
versal category of moral cognition. To love God 
with the conscience, is to love him as manifested 



THE FOURFOLD FOEMS OF PIETY. 



7 



in right and justice; is to love right or justice, not 
for its convenience, its specific uses, but for itself, 
because it is absolutely beautiful and lovely to the 
conscience. In changeable things we read the un- 
changing and eternal right, which is the absolute 
object of conscience. 

To love right is a great moral excellence ; but it 
is plain you must have a universal love of univer- 
sal right before you can have any special love of 
a particular right ; for, in all moral affairs, the uni- 
versal is the logical condition of the special. 

The love of right is the moral part of piety. 
This lies at the basis of all moral excellence what- 
ever. Without this you may love right for its 
uses ; but if only so, it is not right you love, but 
only the convenience it may bring to you in your 
selfish schemes. None was so ready to draw the 
sword for Jesus, or look after the money spent upon 
him, as the disciples who straightway denied and 
betrayed him. Many wish right on their side, who 
take small heed to be on the side of right. You 
shall find men enough who seem to love right in 
general, because they clamor for a specific, par- 
ticular right ; but ere long it becomes plain they 
only love the personal convenience they hope 
therefrom. The people of the United States claim 
to love the unalienable right of man to life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness. But the long-con- 



8 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



tinued cry of three million slaves, groaning under 
the American yoke, shows beyond question or 
cavil that it is not the universal and unalienable 
right which they love, but only the selfish advan- 
tage it affords them. If you love the right as 
right, for itself, because it is absolutely beautiful 
to your conscience, then you will no more deprive 
another of it than submit yourself to be deprived 
thereof. Even the robber will fight for his own. 
The man who knows no better rests in the selfish 
love of the private use of a special right. 

The Heart contemplates God as manifested in 
love, for love is the universal category of affec- 
tional cognition. To love God with the heart, is to 
love him as manifested in love ; it is to love Love, 
not for its convenience, but for itself, because it is 
absolutely beautiful and lovely to the heart. 

Here I need not reiterate what has already been 
twice said, of mind and of conscience. 

Love of God as love, then, is the affectional part 
of piety, and lies at the basis of all affectional ex- 
cellence. The mind and the conscience are con- 
tent with ideas, with the true and the right, while 
the heart demands not ideas, but beings, persons ; 
and loves them. It is one thing to desire the love 
of a person for your own use and convenience, 
and quite different to have your personal delight 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



9 



in him, and desire him to have his personal delight 
in you. From the nature of the case, as persons 
are concrete and finite, man never finds the com- 
plete satisfaction of his affectional nature in them, 
for no person is absolutely lovely, none the abso- 
lute object of the affections. But as the mind and 
conscience use the finite things to help learn in- 
finite truth and infinite right, and ultimately rest 
in that as their absolute object, so our heart uses 
the finite persons whom we reciprocally love as 
golden letters in the book of life, whereby we learn 
the absolutely lovely, the infinite object of the 
heart. As the philosopher has the stars of heaven, 
each lovely in itself, whereby to learn the absolute 
truth of science, — as the moralist has the events of 
human history, each of great moment to mankind, 
whereby to learn the absolute right of ethics, — 
so the philanthropist has the special persons of 
his acquaintance, each one a joy to him, as the 
rounds of his Jacob's ladder whereby he goes 
journeying up to the absolutely lovely, the infinite 
object of the affections. 

The Soul contemplates God as a being who 
unites all these various modes of action, as mani- 
fested in truth, in right, and in love. It appre- 
hends him, not merely as absolute truth, absolute 
right, and absolute love alone, but as all these uni- 



10 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



fied into one complete and perfect Being, the In- 
finite God. He is the absolute object of the soul, 
and corresponds thereto, as truth to the mind, as 
justice to the conscience, as love to the heart. He 
is to the soul absolutely true, just, and lovely, the 
altogether beautiful. To him the soul turns in- 
stinctively at first ; then also, at length, with con- 
scious and distinctive will. 

The love of God in this fourfold way is the to- 
tality of piety, which comes from the normal use of 
all the faculties named before. Hence it appears 
that piety of this character lies at the basis of all 
manly excellence whatever, and is necessary to a 
complete and well-proportioned development of 
the faculties themselves. 

There may be an unconscious piety : the man 
does not know that he loves universal truth, jus- 
tice, love ; loves God. He only thinks of the 
special truth, justice, and love, which he prizes. 
He does not reflect upon it ; does not aim to love 
God in this way, yet does it, nevertheless. Many 
a philosopher has seemed without religion even to 
a careful observer ; sometimes has passed for an 
atheist. Some of them have to themselves seemed 
without any religion, and have denied that there 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 11 



was any God. But all the while their nature was 
truer than their will ; their instinct kept their per- 
sonal wholeness better than they were aware. 
These men loved absolute truth, not for its uses, 
but for itself; they laid down their lives for it, 
rather than violate the integrity of their intellect. 
They had the intellectual love of God, though they 
knew it not ; though they denied it. No man ever 
has a complete and perfect intellectual conscious- 
ness of all his active nature ; something instinctive 
germinates in us, and grows under ground, as it 
were, before it bursts the sod and shoots into the 
light of self-consciousness. Sheathed in uncon- 
sciousness lies the bud, ere long to open a bright, 
consummate flower. These philosophers, with a 
real love of truth, and yet a scorn of the name of 
God, understand many things, perhaps, not known 
to common men, but this portion of their nature 
has yet escaped their eye ; they have not made an 
exact and exhaustive inventory of the facts of their 
own nature. Such men have unconsciously much 
of the intellectual part of piety. 

Other men have loved justice, not for the per- 
sonal convenience it offered to them, but for its 
own sake, because it married itself to their con- 
science, — have loved it with a disinterested, even a 
self-denying love, — who yet scorned religion, denied 
all consciousness of God, denied his providence, 



12 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



perhaps his existence, and would have resolved 
God into matter, and no more. Yet all the while 
in these men, dim and unconscious, there lay the 
religious element ; neglected, unknown, it gave 
the man the very love of special justice which 
made him strong. He knew the absolutely just, 
but did not know it as God. 

I have known philanthropists who undervalued 
piety ; they liked it not, — they said it was moon- 
light, not broad day; it gave flashes of lightning, 
all of which would not make light. They pro- 
fessed no love of God, no knowledge thereof, while 
they had the strongest love of love ; loved persons, 
not with a selfish, but a self-denying affection, ready 
to sacrifice themselves for the completeness of an- 
other man's delight. Yet underneath this philan- 
thropy there lay the absolute and disinterested love 
of other men. They knew only the special form, 
not the universal substance thereof, — the particular 
love of Thomas or of Jane, not the universal love 
of the Infinite. They had the affectional form of 
piety, though they knew it not. 

I have known a man full of admiration and of 
love for the universe, yet lacking consciousness of 
its Author. He loved the truth and beauty of the 
world, reverenced the justice of the universe, and 
was himself delighted at the love he saw pervad- 
ing all and blessing all ; yet he recognized no God, 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



13 



saw only a cosmic force, which was a power of 
truth and beauty to his mind, a power of justice 
to his conscience, and a power of love to his heart. 
He had not a philosophic consciousness of the 
deeper, nobler action which went on within him, 
building greater than he knew. But in him also 
there were the several parts of piety, only not 
joined into one total and integral act, and not dis- 
tinctly known. 

This unconsciousness of piety is natural with a 
child. In early life it is unavoidable ; only now 
and then some rare and precious boy or girl opens 
from out its husk of unconsciousness his childish 
bud of failh, and blossoms right early with the con- 
sciousness of God, a " strong and flame-like flower." 
This instinctiveness of piety is the beauty of child- 
hood, the morning-red widely and gorgeously dif- 
fused before the rising of the sun. But as a man 
becomes mature, adds reflection to instinct, trans- 
mutes sentiments into ideas, he should also become 
conscious of his religious action, of his love of 
God in this fourfold form ; when he loves truth, 
justice, love, he should know that it is God he loves 
underneath these special forms, and should unite 
them all into one great act of total piety. As the 
state of self-consciousness is a more advanced state 
than unconsciousness ; as the reflective reason of 

the man is above the unreflective instinct of the 
2 



14 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



child ; so the man's conscious piety belongs to a 
higher stage of development, and is above the 
mere instinctive and unconscious piety of the girl. 
Accordingly, the philosopher who loved truth for 
its own sake, and with his mind denied in words 
the God of truth, was less a philosopher for not 
knowing that he loved God. He had less intellect- 
ual power because he was in an abnormal state of 
intellectual religious growth. The man who loved 
justice for its own sake, and would not for an em- 
pire do a conscious wrong, whom the popular hell 
could not scare, nor the popular heaven allure 
from right, — he had less power of justice for not 
knowing that in loving right he loved the God of 
right. That philanthropist who has such love of 
love, that he would lay down his life for men, is 
less a philanthropist, and has less affectional power, 
because he knows not that in his brave benevo- 
lence he loves the God of love. The man full of 
profound love of the universe, of reverence for its 
order, its beauty, its justice, and the love which 
fills the lily's cup with fragrant loveliness, who 
wonders at the mighty cosmic force he sees in these 
fractions of power, — he is less a man because he 
does not know it is God's world that he admires, 
reverences, and worships ; ay, far less a man be- 
cause he does not know he loves and worships 
God. When he becomes conscious of his own 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 15 

spiritual action, conscious of God, of loving God 
with mind and conscience, heart and soul, his 
special love will increase, he will see the defects 
there are in his piety, — if it be disproportionate, 
through redundance here, or failure there ; he can 
correct the deformity and make his entire inner life 
harmonious, a well-proportioned whole. Then he 
feels that he goes in and out, continually, in the 
midst of the vast forces of the universe, which are 
only the forces of God ; that in his studies, when 
he attains a truth, he confronts the thought of 
God; when he learns the right, he learns the will 
of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the 
universe ; and when he feels disinterested love, he 
knows that he partakes the feeling of the Infinite 
God. Then, when he reverences the mighty cos- 
mic force, it is not a blind Fate in an atheistic or 
a pantheistic world, it is the Infinite God that he 
confronts, and feels, and knows. He is then mind- 
ful of the mind of God, conscious of God's con- 
science, sensible of God's sentiment, and his own 
existence is in the Infinite Being of God. Thus 
he joins into a whole integral state of piety the 
various parts developed by the several faculties ; 
there is a new growth of each, a new development 
of all. 

If these things be so, then it is plain what rela- 



16 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



tion piety sustains to manly life; — it is the basis 
of all the higher excellence of man, and when the 
man is mature, what was instinctive at first be- 
comes a state of conscious love of God. 

Now, when this universal fourfold force is once 
developed and brought to consciousness, and the 
man has achieved something in this way, his piety 
may be left to take its natural form of expression, 
or it may be constrained to take a form not natu- 
ral. Mankind has made many experiments upon 
piety ; books of history are full of them. Most of 
these, as of all the experiments of man in prog- 
ress, are failures. We aim many times before we 
hit the mark. The history of religion is not ex- 
ceptional or peculiar in this respect. See how 
widely men experiment in agriculture, navigation, 
government, before they learn the one right way. 
The history of science is the history of mistakes. 
The history of religion and the history of astrono- 
my are equally marked by error. It is not surpris- 
ing that mistakes have been made in respect to 
the forms of piety after it is procured. 

For there are various helps which are needful, 
and perhaps indispensable, in childhood, to the de- 
velopment of the love of God, but which are not 
needed after the religious character is somewhat 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 17 

mature. Then the man needs not these former out- 
ward helps ; he has other aids suited to his greater 
strength. This is true of the individual, repeat- 
ing no more the hymns of his nursery, — true also 
of mankind, that outgrows the sacrifices and the 
mythologies of the childhood of the world. Yet it 
is easy for human indolence to linger near these 
helps, and refuse to pass further on. So the unad- 
venturous nomad in the Tartarian wild keeps his 
flock in the same close-cropped circle where they 
first learned to browse, while the progressive man 
roves ever forth " to fresh fields and pastures new." 
See how parents help develop the body of the 
child. The little boy is put into a standing-stool, 
or baby-jumper, till he learns to walk. By and by 
he has his hoop, his top, his ball ; each in turn is 
laid aside. He has helps to develop his mind not 
less, — little puzzles, tempting him to contrive, — 
prints set off with staring colors; he has his alpha- 
bet of wooden letters, in due time his primer, his 
nursery rhymes, and books full of most wonderful 
impossibilities. He has his early reader, his first 
lessons in arithmetic, and so goes on with new 
helps proportionate to his strength. It is a long 
slope from counting the fingers up to calculating 
the orbit of a planet not yet seen. But the 
fingers and the solar system are alike helps to 
mathematic thought. When the boy is grown up 

2* 



18 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



to man's estate, his body vigorous and mature, he 
tries his strength in the natural work of society, 
is a merchant, a sailor, a mechanic, a farmer ; he 
hews stones, or lifts up an axe upon the thick tim- 
ber. For a long time his body grows stronger by 
his work, and he gets more skill. His body pays 
for itself, and refunds to mankind the cost of its 
training up. When his mind is mature, he ap- 
plies that also to the various works of society, to 
transact private business, or manage the affairs of 
the public ; for a long time his mind grows stronger, 
gaining new knowledge and increase of power. 
Thus his mind pays for its past culture, and earns 
its tuition as it goes along. 

In this case the physical or mental power of the 
man assumes its natural form, and does its natural 
work. He has outgrown the things which pleased 
his childhood and informed his youth. Nobody 
thinks it necessary or beautiful for the accom- 
plished scholar to go back to his alphabet, and 
repeat it over, to return to his early arithmetic 
and paradigms of grammar, when he knows them 
all ; for this is not needful to keep an active mind 
in a normal condition, and perform the mental work 
of a mature man. Nobody sends a lumberer from 
the woods back to his nursery, or tells him he can- 
not keep his strength without daily or weekly 
sleeping in his little cradle, or exercising with a 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



19 



hoop, or top, or ball, which helped his babyhood. 
Because these little trifles helped him once, they 
cannot help him now. Man, reaching forward, for- 
gets the things that are behind. 

Now the mischief is, that, in matters of religion, 
men demand that he who has a mature and well- 
proportioned piety should always go back to the 
rude helps of his boyhood, to the A B C of relig- 
ion and the nursery books of piety. He is not 
bid to take his power of piety and apply that to 
the common works of life. The Newton of piety 
is sent back to the dame-school of religion, and 
told to keep counting his fingers, otherwise there is 
no health in him, and all piety is wiped out of his 
consciousness, and he hates God and God hates 
him. He must study the anicular lines on the 
school-dame's slate, not the diagrams of God writ 
on the heavens in points of fire. We are told that 
what once thus helped to form a religious character 
must be continually resorted to, and become the 
permanent form thereof. 

This notion is exceedingly pernicious. It wastes 
the practical power of piety by directing it from 
its natural work ; it keeps the steam-engine always 
fanning and blowing itself, perpetually firing itself 
up, while it turns no wheels but its own, and does 
no work but feed and fire itself. This constant 
firing up of one's self is looked on as the natural 



20 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



work and only form of piety. Ask any popular 
minister, in one of the predominant sects, for the 
man most marked for piety, and he will not show 
you the men with the power of business who do 
the work of life, — the upright mechanic, merchant, 
or farmer ; not the men with the power of thought, 
of justice, or of love; not him whose whole life is 
one great act of fourfold piety. No, he will show 
you some men who are always a dawdling over 
their souls, going back to the baby-jumpers and 
nursery rhymes of their early days, and everlast- 
ingly coming to the church to fire themselves up, 
calling themselves " miserable offenders," and say- 
ing, " Save us, good Lord." If a man thinks him- 
self a miserable offender, let him away with the 
offence, and be done with the complaint at once 
and for ever. It is dangerous to reiterate so sad 
a cry. 

You see this mistake, on a large scale, in the 
zeal with which nations or sects cling to their re- 
ligious institutions long after they are obsolete. 
Thus the Hebrew cleaves to his ancient ritual and 
ancient creed, refusing to share the religious sci- 
ence which mankind has brought to light since Mo- 
ses and Samuel went home to their God. The two 
great sects of Christendom exhibit the same thing in 
their adherence to ceremonies and opinions which 
once were the greatest helps and the highest ex- 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



21 



pression of piety to mankind, but which have long 
since lost all virtue except as relics. The same 
error is repeated on a small scale all about us, 
men trying to believe what science proves ridicu- 
lous, and only succeeding by the destruction of 
reason. It was easy to make the mistake, but 
when made it need not be made perpetual. 

Then this causes another evil; not only do men 
waste the practical power of piety, but they cease 
to get more. To feed on baby's food, to be dan- 
dled in mother's arms, — to play with boys' play- 
things, to learn boys' lessons, and be amused with 
boys' stories, — this helps the boy, but it hinders 
the man. Long ago we got from these helps all 
that was in them. To stay longer is waste of 
time. Look at the men who have been doing 
this for ten years ; they are where they were ten 
years ago. They have done well if they have not 
fallen back. If we keep the baby's shoes for ever 
on the child, what will become of the feet ? "What 
if you kept the boy over his nursery rhymes for 
ever, or tried to make the man grown believe that 
they contained the finest poetry in the world, that 
the giant stories and the fairy tales therein were 
all true ; what effect w T ould it have on his mind ? 
Suppose you told him that the proof of his man- 
hood consisted in his fondness for little boys' play- 
things, and the little story-books and the little 



22 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



games of little children, and kept him securely- 
fastened to the apron-strings of the school-dame ; 
suppose you could make him believe so! You 
must make him a fool first. What would work so 
bad in intellectual affairs works quite as ill in the 
matter of piety. The story of the flood has stran- 
gled a world of souls. The miracles of the New 
Testament no longer heal, but hurt mankind. 

Then this method of procedure disgusts well- 
educated and powerful men with piety itself, and 
with all that bears the name of religion. " Go 
your ways," say they, " and cant your canting as 
much as you like, only come not near us with your 
grimace." Many a man sees this misdirection of 
piety, and the bigotry which environs it, and turns 
off from religion itself, and will have nothing to 
do with it. Philosophers always have had a bad 
name in religious matters ; many of them have 
turned away in disgust from the folly which is 
taught in its name. Of all the great philosophers 
of this day, I think no one takes any interest in 
the popular forms of religion. Do we ever hear 
religion referred to in politics ? It is mentioned 
officially in proclamations and messages ; but in 
the parliamentary debates of Europe and America, 
in the state papers of the nations, you find hardly 
a trace of the name or the fact. Honest men and 
manly men are ashamed to refer to this, because it 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 23 



has been so connected with unmanly dawdling and 
niggardly turning back, — they dislike to mention 
the word. So religion has ceased to be one of the 
recognized forces of the state. I do not remember 
a good law passed in my time from an alleged 
religious motive. Capital punishment, and the 
laws forbidding work or play on Sunday, are the 
only things left on the statute-book for which a 
strictly religious motive is assigned. The annual 
thanksgivings and fast-days are mementos of the 
political power of the popular religious opinions 
in other times. Men of great influence in Amer- 
ica are commonly men of little apparent respect 
for religion ; it seems to have no influence on their 
public conduct, and, in many cases, none on their 
private character ; the class most eminent for intel- 
lectual culture is heedless of religion throughout 
all Christendom. The class of rich men have small 
esteem for it ; yet in all the great towns of America 
the most reputable churches have fallen under their 
control, with such results as we see. The life of 
the nation in its great flood passes by, and does 
not touch the churches, — " the institutions of re- 
ligion." Such fatal errors come from this mis- 
take. 

But there is a natural form of piety. The natu- 
ral use of the strength of a strong man, or the wis- 



24 THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



dom of a wise one, is to do the work of a strong 
man or a wise one. What is the natural work of 
piety ? Obviously it is practical life ; the use of all 
the faculties in their proper spheres, and for their 
natural function. Love of God, as truth, justice, 
love, must appear in a life marked by these quali- 
ties; that is the only effectual "ordinance of re- 
ligion. 5 ' A profession of the man's convictions, 
joining a society, assisting at a ceremony, — all 
these are of the same value in science as in re- 
ligion ; as good forms of chemistry as of piety. 
The natural form of piety is goodness, morality, 
living a true, just, affectionate, self-faithful life, from 
the motive of a pious man. Real piety, love of 
God, if left to itself, assumes the form of real 
morality, loyal obedience to God's law. Thus the 
power of religion does the work of religion, and is 
not merely to feed itself. 

There are various degrees of piety, the quality 
ever the same, the quantity variable, and of course 
various degrees of goodness as the result thereof. 
Where there is but little piety, the work of good- 
ness is done as a duty, under coercion as it were, 
with only the voluntary, not the spontaneous will ; 
it is not done from a love of the duty, only in obe- 
dience to a law of God felt within the conscience 
or the soul, a law which bids the deed. The 
man's desires and duty are in opposition, not con- 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



25 



junction, but duty rules. That is the goodness of a 
boy in religion, the common goodness of the world. 

At length the rising man shoots above this rudi- 
mentary state, has an increase of love of God, and 
therefore of love of man ; his goodness is spon- 
taneous, not enforced by volition. He does the 
good thing which comes in his way, and because 
it comes in his way ; is true to his mind, his con- 
science, heart, and soul, and feels small temptation 
to do to others what he would not receive from 
them ; he will deny himself for the sake of his 
brother near at hand. His desire attracts in the 
line of his duty, both in conjunction now. Not 
in vain does the poor, the oppressed, the hunted 
fugitive look up to him. This is the goodness of 
men well grown in piety. You find such men in 
all Christian sects, Protestant and Catholic ; in all 
the great religious parties of the civilized world, 
among Buddhists, Mahometans, and Jews. They 
are kind fathers, generous citizens, unimpeachable 
in their business, beautiful in their daily lives. You 
see the man's piety in his work, and in his play. 
It appears in all the forms of his activity, individ- 
ual, domestic, social, ecclesiastic, or political. 

But the man goes on in his growth of piety, 
loving truth, justice, love, loving God the more. 
What is piety within must be morality without. 
The quality and quantity of the outward must in- 

3 



26 THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



crease as the quality and quantity of the inward. 
So his eminent piety must become eminent morali- 
ty, which is philanthropy. He loves not only his 
kindred and his country, but all mankind ; not 
only the good, but also the evil. He has more 
goodness than the channels of his daily life will 
hold. So it runs over the banks, to water and to 
feed a thousand thirsty plants. Not content with 
the duty that lies along his track, he goes out to 
seek it ; not only willing, he has a salient longing 
to do good, to spread his truth, his justice, his love, 
his piety, over all the world. His daily life is a 
profession of his conscious piety to God, pub- 
lished in perpetual good-will to men. 

This is the natural form of piety; one which it 
assumes if left to itself. Not more naturally does 
the beaver build, or the blackbird sing her own 
wild gushing melody, than the man of real piety 
lives it in this beautiful outward life. So from 
the perennial spring wells forth the stream to quick- 
en the meadow with new access of green, and per- 
fect beauty bursting into bloom. 

Thus piety does the work it was meant to do : 
the man does not sigh and weep, and make grim- 
aces, for ever in a fuss about his soul; he lives 
right on. Is his life marked with errors, sins, — he 
ploughs over the barren spot with his remorse, sows 
with new seed, and the old desert blossoms like a 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



27 



rose. He is free in his spiritual life, not confined 
to set forms of thought, of action, or of feeling. 
He accepts what his mind regards as true, what 
his conscience decides is right, what his heart 
deems lovely, and what is holy to his soul ; all else 
he puts far from him. Though the ancient and 
the honorable of the earth bid him bow down to 
them, his stubborn knees bend only at the bidding 
of his manly soul. His piety is his freedom before 
God, not his bondage unto men. The toys and 
child's stories of religion are to him toys and child's 
stories, but no more. No baby-shoes deform his 
manly feet. 

This piety, thus left to obey its natural law, 
keeps in sound health, and grows continually more 
and more. Doing his task, the man makes no 
more ado about his soul than about his sense. 
Yet it grows like the oak-tree. He gets continu- 
ally more love of truth and right and justice, more 
love of God, and so more love of man. Every 
faculty becomes continually more. His mind acts 
after the universal law of the intellect, his con- 
science according to the universal moral law, his 
affections and his soul after the universal law 
thereof, and so he is strong with the strength of 
God, in this fourfold way communicating with him. 
With this strengthening of the moral faculties 
there comes a tranquillity, a calmness and repose, 



28 THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



which nothing else can give, and also a beauty 
of character which you vainly seek elsewhere. 
"When a man has the intellectual, the moral, the 
affectional part of piety, when he unites them all 
with conscious love of God, and puts that mani- 
fold piety into morality, his eminent piety into 
philanthropy, he attains the highest form of loveli- 
ness which belongs to mortal man. His is the 
palmy loftiness of man, — such strength, such calm- 
ness, and such transcendent loveliness of soul. 

I know some men mock at the name of piety. 
I do not wonder at their scoff ; for it has been 
made to stand as the symbol of littleness, mean- 
ness, envy, bigotry, and hypocritical supersti- 
tion ; for qualities I hate to name. Of what is 
popularly called piety there is no lack ; it is 
abundant everywhere, common as weeds in the 
ditch, and clogs the wheels of mankind in every 
quarter of the world. Yet real piety, in manly 
quantity and in a manly form, is an uncommon 
thing. It is marvellous what wants the want of 
this brings in : look over the long list of brilliant 
names that glitter in English history for the past 
three hundred years, study their aims, their outward 
and their inner life ; explore the causes of their 
manifold defeat, and you will see the primal curse 
of all these men was lack of piety. They did not 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



29 



love truth, justice, or love, they did not love God 
with all their mind and conscience, heart and souL 
Hence came the failure of many a mighty-minded 
man. Look at the brilliant array of distinguished 
talent in France for the last five generations ; what 
intellectual gifts, what understanding, what im- 
agination, what reason, but with it all what cor- 
ruption, what waste of faculty, what lack of strong 
and calm and holy life, in these great, famous 
men ! Their literature seems marvellously like the 
thin, cold dazzle of northern lights upon the wintry 
ice. In our own country it is still the same ; the 
high intellectual gift or culture is ashamed of relig- 
ion, and flouts at God ; and hence the faults we see. 

But real piety is what we need ; we need much 
of it, — need it in the natural form thereof. Ours 
is an age of great activity. The peaceful hand 
was never so busy as to-day ; the productive head 
never created so fast before. See how the forces 
of nature yield themselves up to man : the river 
stops for him, content to be his servant, and weave 
and spin ; the ocean is his vassal, his toilsome 
bondsman ; the lightning stoops out of heaven, and 
bears thoughtful burdens on its electric track from 
town to town. All this comes from the rapid ac- 
tivity of the lower intellect of man. Is there a con- 
scious piety to correspond with this, — a conscious 
love of truth and right and love, — a love of God ? 

3* 



30 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



Ask the state, ask the church, ask society, and ask 
our homes. 

The age requires a piety most eminent. What 
was religion enough for the time of the Patriarchs, 
or the Prophets, or the Apostles, or the Reformers, 
or the Puritans, is not enough for the heightened 
consciousness of mankind to-day. When the 
world thinks in lightning, it is not proportionate 
to pray in lead. The old theologies, the philoso- 
phies of religion of ancient time, will not suffice 
us now. We want a religion of the intellect, of 
the conscience, of the affections, of the soul, — the 
natural religion of all the faculties of man. The 
form also must be natural and new. 

We want this natural piety in the form of nor- 
mal human life, — morality, philanthropy. Piety 
is not to forsake, but possess the world ; not to 
become incarnate in a nun and a monk, but in 
women and in men. Here are the duties of life 
to be done. You are to do them, do them relig- 
iously, consciously obedient to the law of God, not 
atheistically, loving only your selfish gain. Here 
are the sins of trade to be corrected. You are to 
show that a good merchant, mechanic, farmer, 
doctor, lawyer, is a real saint, a saint at work. 
Here are the errors of philosophy, theology, poli- 
tics, to be made way with. It is the function of 
piety to abolish these and supply their place with 



THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



31 



new truths all radiant of God. Here are the great 
evils of church and state, of social and domestic 
life, wrongs to be righted, evils to be outgrown : 
it is the business of piety to mend all this. Ours 
is no age when Religion can forsake the broad way 
of life. In the public street must she journey on, 
open her shop in the crowded square, and teach 
men by deeds, her life more eloquent than her lips. 
Hers is not now the voice that is to cry in the 
wilderness, but in the public haunts of men must 
she call them to make straight their ways. 

We must possess all parts of this piety, — the 
intellectual, moral, affectional, — yea, total piety. 
This is not an age when men in religion's name 
can safely sneer at philosophy, call reason " car- 
nal," make mouths at immutable justice, and blast 
with their damnations the faces of mankind. 
Priests have had their day, and in dull corners still 
aim to protract their favorite and most ancient 
night; but the sun has risen with healing in his 
wings. Piety without goodness, without justice, 
without truth or love, is seen to be the pretence of 
the hypocrite. Can philosophy satisfy us without 
religion ? Even the head feels a coldness from the 
want of piety. The greatest intellect is ruled by 
the same integral laws with the least, and needs 
this fourfold love of God ; and the great intellects 
that scorn religion are largest sufferers from their 
scorn. 



32 THE FOURFOLD FORMS OF PIETY. 



Any man may attain this piety ; it lies level to 
all. Yet it is not to be won without difficulty, 
manly effort, self-denial of the low for the sake of 
the highest in us. Of you, young man, young 
maid, it will demand both prayer and toil. Not 
without great efforts are great heights won. In 
your period of passion you must subordinate in- 
stinctive desire to your reason, your conscience, 
your heart and soul ; the lust of the body to the 
spirit's love. In the period of ambition you must 
coordinate all that is personal or selfish with what 
is absolutely true, just, holy, and good. Surely 
this will demand self-denial, now of instinctive 
desire, now of selfish ambition. Much you must 
sacrifice. But you will gain the possession, the 
use, the development, and the joy of your own 
mind and conscience, heart and soul. You will 
never sacrifice truth, justice, holiness, or love. All 
these you will gain ; gain for to-day, gain for ever. 
What inward blessedness will you acquire ! what 
strength, what tranquillity, what loveliness, what 
joy in God ! You will have your delight in Him. 
He his in you. Is it not worth while to live so 
that you know you are in unison with God ; in 
unison, too, with men ; in quantity growing more, 
in quality superior ? Make the trial for manly 
excellence, and the result is yours, for time and for 
eternity. * 



II. 



OF TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT, 



BUY THE TRUTH, AND SELL IT NOT ; ALSO WISDOM, AND IN- 
STRUCTION, AND UNDERSTANDING. — PrOY. Xxiii. 23. 

Temperance is corporeal piety ; it is the preser- 
vation of divine order in the body. It is the har- 
mony of all the members thereof; the true sym- 
metry and right proportion of part with part, of each 
with all, and so the worship of God with every 
limb of the body. Wisdom is to the mind what 
temperance, in this sense, is to the body ; it is in- 
tellectual piety; the presence of divine order in 
the mind; the harmony of all the faculties there- 
of; the true symmetry and right proportion of 
faculty with faculty, of each with all. It is a gen- 
eral power of intellect, which may turn in any one 
or in all directions ; the poet is a wise man in 
what relates to poetry ; the philosopher, the states- 
man, the man of business, each in what relates to 
his particular function. So it is a general power of 



34 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



mind. We say " knowledge is power/' but mean 
wisdom, which is general intellectual ability, the 
power of knowing and of using truth. 

This wisdom implies two things : the love of 
truth as truth, which I spoke of the other day as 
the intellectual side of piety ; and, secondly, the 
power to possess and use this truth, either in the 
specific form which is sought by the philosopher, 
poet, statesman, and man of business, or else in 
some more general form including all these ; the 
power of getting truth either by the mode of re- 
flection, as truth demonstrated, or by the mode of 
intuition, as truth seen and known at sight. For 
the acquisitive part of wisdom is the generic power 
which includes both the specific powers, — of in- 
tuition and of reflection. 

Truth is the object which corresponds to the 
mind. As the eye has the power of sight, and as 
the special things we see are the object of the eye, 
so is truth, in its various forms, the object of the 
mind. If a man keep the law of his body, in the 
large sense of the word Temperance, he acquires 
three good things, health, strength, and beauty. 
As a general rule these three will come ; there are. 
indeed, particular and personal exceptions, but such 
is the rule. Let any race of men, say the New- 
Englanders, for a hundred years fulfil all the con- 
ditions of the body, and observe the laws thereof, 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



35 



they will become distinguished for these three 
things. 

In like manner, if a man keep the law of his 
mind, and fulfil its natural conditions, he acquires 
wisdom, — acquires intellectual health, strength, 
and beauty. Here also there may be particular 
and personal exceptions, but such is the rule. Let 
any race of men, say the New-Englanders, for a 
hundred years fulfil the natural condition of mind 
and keep the law thereof, we should have these 
three qualities to a greater degree than the ancient 
inhabitants of Athens, long regarded as the most 
intellectual race in the world ; we should have the 
quality of wisdom which they had, but with more 
intellectual health, strength, and loveliness, more 
truth and more power to use it, inasmuch as the 
human race has acquired a greater intellectual de- 
velopment in the two thousand years that have 
passed since the days of Aristotle and Alexander. 
The laws which regulate the development of mind, 
in the individual or the race, are as certain as the 
laws of matter. Observance thereof is sure to bring 
certain consequences to the individual, the nation, 
and mankind. The intellectual peculiarity of a 
nation is transmitted from age to age, and only 
disappears when the nation perishes or mingles 
with some other tribe inferior to itself ; then it does 
not cease, but is spread more thinly over a wider 



36 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



field, and does not appear in its ancient form for 
years to come. Intellectual talent dies out of a 
particular family. There are seldom two men of 
genius of the same name. Stuarts and Tudors, 
Guelphs and Bourbons, there are in abundance, 
but only one Luther, Shakspeare, Milton, Crom- 
well, Burns ; only a single Franklin or Washing- 
ton. But the intellectual power which once rose 
up in such men does not perish from the race, 
only from the special family. It comes up in other 
names, for the fee of all the genius that is born, 
as well as the achievements won, vests perpetually 
in mankind; not in the special family which holds 
its life estate of talent under the race and of it. 
The wisdom which this generation shall develop, 
foster, and mature, will not perish with this age ; 
it will be added to the spiritual property of man- 
kind, and go down, bequeathed as a rich legacy, 
to such as come after us, all the more valuable be- 
cause it is given in perpetual entail, a property 
which does not waste, but greatens in the use. Yet 
probably no great man of this age will leave a 
child as great as himself. At death the fathers 
greatness becomes public property to the next gen- 
eration. The piety of Jesus of Nazareth did not 
die out of mankind when he gave up the ghost ; 
the second century had more of Christ than the 
first ; there has been a perpetual increase of So- 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



37 



cratic excellence ever since the death of the Athe- 
nian sage. 

This is a remarkable law of Providence, but a 
law it is ; and cheering is it to know that all the 
good qualities you give example of, not only have 
a personal immortality in you beyond the grave, 
but a national, even a human, immortality on earth, 
and, while they bless you in heaven, are likewise 
safely invested in your brother man, and shall go 
down to the last posterity, blessing your nation 
and all mankind. So the great men of antiquity 
continue to help us, — Moses, Confucius, Buddha, 
Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, — not to 
dwell upon the name dearest of all. These men and 
their fellows, known to all or long since forgotten 
of mankind, — the aristocracy of heaven, whose 
patent of nobility dates direct from God, — they 
added to the spiritual power of mankind. The 
wisdom they inherited or acquired was a personal 
fief, which at their death reverted to the human 
race. Not a poor boy in Christendom, not a 
man of genius, rejoicing in the plenitude of power, 
but is greater and nobler for these great men ; not 
barely through his knowledge of their example, but 
because, so to say, they raised the temperature of 
the human world. For, as there is a physical tem- 
perature of the interstellar spaces, betwixt sun 
and sun, which may be called the temperature 

4 



i 

38 TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 

of the universe, so is there a spiritual temperature 
of the interpersonal spaces, a certain common 
temperature of spirit, not barely personal, not 
national alone, but human and of the race, which 
may be called the temperature of mankind. On 
that in general we all depend, as on our fam- 
ily in special, or in particular upon our personal 
genius and our will. Those great men added wis- 
dom to mankind, brought special truths to con- 
sciousness, which now have spread throughout the 
enlightened nations of the world, and penetrate pro- 
gressively the human mass, giving mankind con- 
tinual new power. So shall you see an iron bar 
become magnetic; first it was a single atom of 
the metal which caught the electric influence, 
spark by spark ; that atom could not hold the 
subtile fire, whose nature was to spread, and so 
one atom gave the spark to the next, and soon it 
spread through the whole, till the cold iron, which 
before seemed dead as stone, is all magnetic, 
acquires new powers, and itself can hold its own, 
yet magnetize a thousand bars if rightly placed. 

According to his nature man loves truth with a 
pure and disinterested love, the strongest intel- 
lectual affection. The healthy eye does not more 
naturally turn to the light, than the honest mind 
turns toward the truth. See how we seek after it 



TRUTH 



AND 



THE INTELLECT. 



39 



in nature. All the National Academies, Institutes, 
and Royal Societies are but so many companies 
organized for the pursuit of truth, — of truth chiefly 
in some outward form, materialized in the visible 
world. These societies propose no corporeal ben- 
efit to themselves, none to the human race. They 
love each truth of nature for its own fair sake. 
What is the pecuniary value of the satellites of 
Neptune to us? See how laborious naturalists 
ransack the globe to learn the truths writ in its 
elements. One goes to Florida to look after some 
bones of a mastodon, hid in a bog some thousands 
of years ago ; another curiously collects chips of 
stone from all the ledges of the world, lives and 
moves and has his being in the infra-carboniferous 
sandstones and shales, a companion of fossil plants 
and fossil shells. This crosses land and ocean to 
study the herbage of the earth ; that, careless of 
ease and homefelt joys, devotes his life to mosses 
and lichens, which grow unheeded on the rocks ; 
he loves them as if they were his own children, 
yet they return no corresponding smile, nor can he 
eat and drink of them. How the astronomer loves 
to learn the truth of the stars, which will not light 
his fire nor fill his children's hungry mouths! No 
Inquisition can stop Galileo in his starry quest. 
I have known a miser who loved money above all 
things ; for this, would sacrifice reason, conscience, 



40 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



and religion, and break affection's bond ; but it wae 
the use of money that was loved, with a mean and 
most ignoble selfish last, vulgarizing and deprav- 
ing the man. The true disciple of science loves 
truth far more, with a disinterested love ; will 
endure toil, privation, and self-denial, and en- 
counter suffering, for that. This love of truth will 
bless the lover all his days ; yet when he brings 
her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty- 
handed to his door, herself her only dower. 

How carefully men look after the facts of hu- 
man history! how they study the tragic tale of 
Greece and Rome, and explore the remains of na- 
tions that long since have perished from the earth ! 
Of what material consequence is it to us who 
composed the Iliad, twenty-five hundred years 
ago, or whether Homer wrote, or only sung, his 
never-dying song? Yet what a mass of literature 
has come into being within the last sixty years 
to settle these two questions! How the famous 
scholars light their lamps and dim their eyes over 
this work, and how the world rejoices in their 
books, which will not bake bread, nor make two 
blades of grass grow where only one rose up be- 
fore ; which will not build a railroad, nor elect a 
president, nor give a man an office in any custom- 
house of the wide world ! There is a deep love of 
truth in men, even in these poor details. A natu- 
ral king looks royal at the plough. 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



41 



How men study yet higher modes of truth, writ 
in the facts of human consciousness ! How the 
ablest men have worked at the severest forms of 
intellectual toil, yet proposing no gain to them- 
selves, only the glorious godliness of truth ! A 
corporeal gain to men does come from every such 
truth. There is such a solidarity betwixt the mind 
and body, that each spiritual truth works welfare 
in the material world, and the most abstract of 
ideas becomes concrete in the widest universe of 
welfare. But philosophers love the truth before 
they learn its material use. Aristotle, making 
an exhaustive analysis of the mind of man, did 
not design to build a commonwealth in New Eng- 
land, and set up public schools. 

This love of truth, instinctive and reflective 
both, is so powerful in human nature, that man- 
kind will not rest till we have an idea correspond- 
ing to every fact of nature and of human con- 
sciousness, and the contents of the universe are 
repeated in the cosmic mind of man, which grasps 
the whole of things. The philosophic work of 
observation, analysis and synthesis, will not be 
over, till the whole world of material nature is 
comprehended by the world of human nature. 
Such is our love, not only of special truths, but of 
total truth. 

Consider what an apparatus man has devised 

4* 



42 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



to aid the search for truth : not only visible tools 
to magnify the little and bring near us the remote, 
but the invisible weapons of the mind, — mathe- 
matics and the various sciences, the mining-tools 
with which we dig for truth, — logic, the Lydian 
stone to test the true, — rhetoric, the art to com- 
municate, — language, speech itself, the most 
amazing weapon of the human mind, an instru- 
ment half made on purpose, and half given with- 
out our thought. 

This love of truth is the natural and instinctive 
piety of the mind. In studying the facts of na- 
ture, material or human, I study the thought of 
God ; for in the world of real things a fact is the 
direct speech of the Father. Words make up the 
language of men; facts and ideas are the words 
of God, his universal language to the Englishman 
and the Chinese, in which He speaks from all 
eternity to all time. Man made " in the image of 
God " loves his Fathers thought, and is not con- 
tented till he hears that speech ; then he is satis- 
fied. All intellectual error is but the babble of the 
baby-man. Every truth which I know is one point 
common to my consciousness and the conscious- 
ness of God; in this we approach, and, so far as 
that goes, God's thought is my thought, and we 
are at one. Mankind will not be content till we 
also are conscious of the universe, and have mas- 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



43 



tered this Bible of God writ in the material 
world, a perpetual lesson for the day. 

I cannot think we value wisdom high enough; 
not in proportion to other things for more vulgar 
use. We prize the material results of wisdom 
more than the cause which produces them. Let 
us not undervalue the use. What is it which gives 
Christendom its rank in the world ? What gives 
Old England or New England her material de- 
light, — our comfortable homes, our mills and ships 
and shops, these iron roads which so cover the 
land ? It is not the soil, hard and ungrateful ; not 
the sky, cold and stormy half the year ; it is the 
educated mind, the practical wisdom of the peo- 
ple. The Italian has his sunnier sky, his labored 
land, which teems with the cultured luxuriance of 
three thousand years. Our outfit was the wilder- 
ness and our head. God gave us these, and said, 
" Subdue the earth " ; and we have toiled at the 
problem, not quite in vain. The mind is a uni- 
versal tool, the abstract of all instruments ; it con- 
cretizes in the past present and future weapons of 
mankind. 

We value wisdom chiefly for its practical use, 
as the convenience of a weapon, not the function 
of a limb; and truth as a servant, not a bride. 
The reason of this seeming falseness to the intel- 



44 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



lectual instinct is found partly in the low develop- 
ment of man, — the external precedes the spiritual 
in order of unfolding, — and partly in this, that the 
human race is still too poor to indulge in merely 
intellectual delights, while material wants are not 
yet satisfied. Mankind rejoices in rough aprons 
of camel's hair, and feeds on locusts and wild 
honey, before there is purple and fine linen for all, 
with sumptuous faring every day. Even now a 
fourth part of the human family is as good as 
naked. It is too soon to ask men to rejoice ex- 
clusively in the beauty of wisdom, when they 
need its convenience so much. Let us not be too 
severe in our demands of men. God " suffereth 
long, and is kind." 

Then, sour theologies confront us, calling wis- 
dom " foolish," reason " carnal," scoffing at science 
with a priestly sneer, as if knowledge of God, of 
God's world, and of its laws, could disturb the 
natural service of God. We are warned against 
the " arrogance of the philosopher," but by the 
arrogance of the priest. We are told to shun " the 
pride of wisdom " ; alas! it is sometimes the pride 
of folly which gives the caution. 

It seems to me, that the value of the intellect is 
a little underrated by some writers in the New 
Testament, and wisdom sometimes turned off 
rather rudely. Perhaps the reason was, that then. 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



45 



as now, men often cultivated the mind alone, and 
not the highest faculties of that ; and, though ever 
learning, never hit the truth. Doubtless men of 
accomplished mind and manners sneered at the 
rudeness of the Galilean, and with their demonstra- 
tions sought to deny the keen intuitions of great- 
souled men. It is not to be wondered at, that 
James attacked the rich, and Paul the learned, 
of their time. Fox and Bunyan did the same. 
Many a Christian Father has mocked at all gen- 
erous culture of the mind. Even now, with us, 
amongst men desiring to be religious, there is an 
inherited fear of reason and of common sense. 
Science is thought a bad companion for religion. 
Men are cautioned against " free thinking" in re- 
ligion, and, as all thinking must be free, against 
all thinking in that quarter. Even common sense 
is thought dangerous. Men in pews are a little 
afraid, when a strong man goes into the pulpit, lest 
he should shake the ill-bottomed fabric to the 
ground ; men in pulpits are still more fearful. It 
is a strange fear, that the mind should drive the 
soul out of us, and our knowledge of God anni- 
hilate our love of God. Yet some earnest men 
quake with this panic terror, and think it is not 
quite safe to follow the records writ in the great 
Bible of Nature, its world-wide leaves laid open 
before us, with their " millions of surprises." 



46 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



Let me say a word in behalf of the largest cul- 
ture of the intellect, of all faculties thereof, — un- 
derstanding, imagination, reason. I admit there 
have been men of able mind and large intellectual 
development who have turned off from religion, 
their science driving them away from the doctrines 
taught in the name of religion. But such men 
have been few. Did they oppose the truths of 
religion ? Oftener the follies taught in its name. 
All the attacks made on religion itself by men of 
science, from Celsus to Feuerbach, have not done 
so much to bring religion into contempt as a sin- 
gle persecution for witchcraft, or a Bartholomew 
massacre, made in the name of God. At this day, 
in America, the greatest argument against the 
popular form of religion is offered by the churches 
of the land, a twofold argument : first, the follies 
taught as religious doctrine, the character assigned 
to God, the mode of government ascribed to him, 
both here and hereafter, the absurdities and im- 
possibilities taught as the history of God's dealing 
with mankind ; next, the actual character of these 
churches, as a body never rebuking a popular and 
profitable sin, but striking hands by turns with 
every popular form of wrong. Men of science, as a 
class, do not war on the truths, the goodness, and 
the piety that are taught as religion, only on the 
errors, the evil, the impiety, which bear its name. 



TRUTH AXD THE INTELLECT. 



47 



Science is the natural ally of religion. Shall we 
try and separate what God has joined ? We in- 
jure both by the attempt. The philosophers of 
this age have a profound love of truth, and show 
great industry and boldness in search thereof. In 
the name of truth they pluck down the strongholds 
of error, venerable and old. But what a cry has 
been raised against them ! It was pretended that 
they would root out religion from the hearts of 
mankind ! It seems to me it would be better for 
men who love religion to understand philosophy 
before they declaim against "the impiety of mod- 
ern science." The study of nature, of human his- 
tory, or of human nature might be a little more 
profitable than the habit of " hawking at geology 
and schism." A true philosophy is the only cure 
for a false philosophy. The sensational scheme of 
philosophy has done a world of harm, it seems to 
me, in its long history from Epicurus to Comte ; 
but no-philosophy would be far w 7 orse. The ab- 
negation of mind must be the abnegation of God. 
The systems built by priests, who deemed reason 
not fit to trust, are more dangerous than " infidel 
science." Those have been found sad periods of 
time, when the ablest men were forced to spend 
their strength in pulling down the monstrous pa- 
godas built in the name of religion, full of idols 
and instruments of torture. Epicurus, Lucretius, 



48 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



Voltaire, even Hobbes and Hume, performed a 
work indispensable to the religious development 
of mankind. Yet destruction is a sad work ; — set 
your old house afire, you do not know how much 
of it will burn down. It was the ignorance, the 
folly, the arrogance, and the tyranny of a priest- 
hood which made necessary the scoff of Lucian and 
the haughty scorn of D'Holbach. The science of 
philosophers cannot be met by the ignorance of the 
priests ; the pride of wisdom is more than a match 
for the pride of folly ; the philosophy of an unwel- 
come demonstration is ill answered by the foolish- 
ness of preaching. How can a needle's eye em- 
brace a continent? In the name of religion, I 
would call for the spirit of wisdom without meas- 
ure ; have free thinking on the Bible, on the Church, 
on God and man, — the largest liberty of the intel- 
lect. I would sooner have an unreasonable form 
of agriculture than of religion. The state of relig- 
ion is always dependent, in a good measure, on 
the mental culture of mankind. A foolish man 
cannot give you a wise form of piety. All men 
by nature love truth. Cultivate their mind, they 
will see it, know it, value it. Just now we need a 
large development of mind in the clergy, who fall 
behind the men of leading intellect in England, 
America, and France. Thinking men care little 
for the " opinions of the clergy," except on the 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



49 



mere formalities of a ritual and church-show. 
Depend upon it, the effect will be even more bane- 
ful for the future than at present. 

I love to look on the wise mind as one means 
of holding communion with the Infinite God ; for 
I believe that He inspires men. not only through 
the conscience, the affections, and the soul, but 
also through the intellect, through the reason, im- 
agination, and understanding. But he does this, 
not arbitrarily, miraculously, against the nature of 
the mind, but by a mode of operation as constant 
as the gravitation of planets or the chemical attrac- 
tion of atoms of metal. Yet I do not find that He 
inspires thoughtless men with truth, more than 
malicious men with love. Tell me God inspired 
the Hebrew saints with wisdom, filled the vast 
urns of Moses and of Jesus ; I believe it, but not 
Hebrew saints alone. The Grecian saints, the 
saints of Rome, of Germany, of France, of either 
England, Old or New ; all the sons of men hang on 
the breasts of Heaven, and draw inspiration from 
Him "in whom we live and move and have our 
being." Intellectual inspiration comes in the form 
of truth, but the income from God is proportionate 
to the wisdom which seeks and so receives. A 
mind small as a thimble may be filled full thereof, 
but will it receive as much as a mind whose ocean- 
bosom is thirsty for a whole heaven of truth ? 

5 



50 



TRUTH AND THE 



INTELLECT. 



Bring larger intellect, and you have the more. A 
drop would overflow a hollow cherry-stone, while 
whole Mediterranean Seas fill but a fraction of the 
Atlantic's mighty deep. There still is truth in the 
sweet heaven, near and waiting for mankind. A 
man of little mind can only take in the contents 
of his primer ; he should not censure his neighbor 
whose encyclopedic head dines on the science of 
mankind, and still wanders for lack of meat. 

How mankind loves the truth ! We will not let 
it go; 

" One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost " ; 

so native is it to the mind of man. Look on the 
power of a special truth, a great idea ; view it 
merely as a force in the world of men. At first, 
nothing seems so impotent. It has no hands nor 
feet ; how can it go alone ? It seems as if the 
censor of the press could blot it out for ever. It 
flatters no man, offers to serve no personal and 
private interest and then forbear its work, will be 
no man's slave. It seems ready to perish ; surely 
it will give up the ghost the next moment There 
now, a priest has it in the dust and stamps it 
out ! O idle fear ! stamp on the lightning of the 
sky ! Of all things truth is the most lasting ; 
invulnerable as God; "of the Eternal coeternal 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



51 



beam," shall we call it an accident of his being, 
or rather substance of the substance of God, in- 
separable from Him ? The pyramids may fall, in 
ages of time the granite be crumbled into dust and 
blown off by the sirocco of the wilderness ; the 
very mountains, whence they first were hewn, may 
all vanish, evaporate to the sky and spread over 
the world ; but truth shall still remain, immortal, 
unchanging, and not growing old. Heaven and 
earth may pass away, but a truth never. A true 
word cannot fail from amongst men ; it is in- 
dorsed by the Almighty, and shall pass current with 
mankind for ever. Could the armies of the world 
alter the smallest truth of mathematics ; make one 
and one greater or less than two ? As easily as 
they can alter any truth, or any falsehood, in 
morals, in politics, or in religion. A lie is still a 
lie, a truth a truth. 

See the power of some special truth upon a sin- 
gle man. Take an example from a high mode of 
truth, a truth of religion. Saul of Tarsus sees that 
God loves the Gentile as well as the Jew. It 
seems a small thing to see that. "Why did men 
ever think otherwise ? Why should not God love 
the Gentile as well as the Jew? It was impossi- 
ble that He should do otherwise. Yet this seemed 
a great truth at that time, the Christian Church 
dividing upon that matter. It burnt in the bosom 



52 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



of Paul of Tarsus, then a young man. What 
heroism it wakens in him ! what self-denial he can 
endure! Want, hardships, persecution, the con- 
tempt and loathing of his companions and former 
friends, shipwreck, scourging, prison, death, — all 
these are nothing to him. A truth has inspired 
him ; he is eloquent with its new force, his letters 
powerful. Go where he will he finds foes, the 
world bristling with peril ; but go where he may 
he makes friends, makes them by this truth and 
the heroism it awoke in him. Men saw the new 
doctrine, and looked back on the old error, — that 
Jove loved Rome, Pallas Athens, Juno Samos and 
Carthage most of all, Jehovah Mount Zion, and 
Baal his Tyrian towns ; that each several deity 
looked grim at all the rest of men, and so must 
have his own forms and ceremonies, unwelcome 
to the rest. Men see this is an error now ; they 
see the evil which came thereof, — the wars and 
ages full of strife, national jealousies, wrangling 
betwixt Babylonian or Theban priests, and the an- 
tagonism of the Gentile and the Jew. Now all are 
" one in Christ." They bless the lips which taught 
the doctrine and brought them freedom by the 
truth. Meantime the truth uplifts the Apostle ; 
his mind expands, his conscience works more free- 
ly than before, no longer burthened with a law of 
sin and death. His affections have a wider range, 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



53 



knowing no man after his national flesh. His soul 
has a better prospect of God, now the partition- 
wall between the Jew and Gentile is thrown down. 

We often estimate the value of a nation by the 
truths it brings to light. To take the physical 
census, and know how many shall vote, we count 
the heads, and tell men off by millions, — so many 
square miles of Russians, Tartars, or Chinese. 
But to take the spiritual census, and see what 
will be voted, you count the thoughts, tell off the 
great men, enumerate the truths. The nations 
may perish, the barbarian sweep over Thebes, the 
lovely places of Jerusalem become a standing pool, 
and the favorite spot of Socrates and Aristotle 
be grown up to brambles, — yet Egypt, Judea, 
Athens, do not die ; their truths live on, refusing 
death, and still these names are of a classic land. 
I do not think that God loves the men or the na- 
tions He visits with this lofty destiny better than 
He loves other ruder tribes or ruder men : but it is 
by this standard that we estimate the nations; a 
few truths make them immortal. 

A great truth does not disdain to ride on so 
humble a beast as interest. So ideas go abroad 
in the ships of the desert, or the ships of the sea. 
Some nations, like the English and others, seem 
to like this equipage the best, and love to handle 
and taste a truth in the most concrete form ; so 

5* 



54 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



great truths are seen and welcomed as political 
economy before they are thought of as part of 
political morality, human affection, and cosmic 
piety. All the great truths of political science 
seem to have been brought to the consciousness 
of men stimulated by fear, or by love of the re- 
sults of the truth, not of itself. Nations have 
sometimes adopted their ideal children only for 
the practical value of the dress they wore ; but the 
great Providence of the Father sent the truth as 
they were able to bear it. So earthly mothers 
sometimes teach the alphabet to their children in 
letters of sugar. 

But even with us it is not always so. In our 
own day we have seen a man possessed with this 
great idea, — that every man has a right to his 
own body and soul, and consequently that it is 
wrong to hold an innocent man in bondage; that 
no custom, no law, no constitution, no private or 
national interest, can justify the deed; nothing on 
earth, nothing beneath it or above. He applies 
this to American slavery. Here is a conflict be- 
tween an acknowledged truth and what is thought 
a national interest. What an influence did the 
idea have on the man ! It enlarged him, and made 
him powerful, opened the eye of his conscience 
to the hundred-headed injustice in the Lerneean 
Marsh of modern society ; widened his affections, 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



55 



till his heart prayed, ay, and his hands, for the 
poor negro in the Southern swamps, — for all the 
oppressed. It touched and wakened up his soul, 
till he felt a manly piety in place of what might 
else have been a puny sentimentalism, mewling 
and whining in the Church's arms. The idea 
goes abroad, sure to conquer. 

See how a great idea, a truth of morals or re- 
ligion, has an influence on masses of men. Some 
single man sees it first, dimly for a long time, 
without sight enough to make it clear, the quality 
of vision better than his quantity of sight. Then 
he sees it clearly and in distinct outline. The 
truth burns mightily within him, and he cannot 
be still; he tells it, now to one, then to another; 
at each time of telling he gets his lesson better 
learned. Other men see the idea, dimly at first 
as he. It wakens a love for itself; first, perhaps, in 
the recipient heart of some woman, waiting for the 
consolation. Then a few minds prepared for the 
idea half welcome it; thence it timidly flashes in- 
to other minds, as light reflected from the water. 
Soon the like-minded meet together to sun them- 
selves in one another's prayers. They form a 
family of the faith, and grow strong in their com- 
panionship. The circle grows wider. Men oppose 
the new idea, with little skill or much, sometimes 
with violence, or only with intellect. Then comes 



56 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



a little pause, — the ablest representatives of the 
truth must get fully conscious of their truth, and 
of their relation to the world ; a process like that 
in the growing corn of summer, which in hot days 
spindles, as the farmers say, but in cool nights gets 
thick, and has a green and stocky growth. The 
interruptions to a great idea are of corresponding 
value to its development in a man, or a nation, or 
the world. Our men baptized with a new idea 
pause and reflect to be more sure, — perfecting 
the logic of their thought ; pause and devise their 
mode to set it forth, — perfecting their rhetoric, and 
seek to organize it in an outward form, for every 
thought must be a thing. Then they tell their 
idea more perfectly; in the controversy that fol- 
lows, errors connected with it get exposed ; all 
that is merely accidental, national, or personal 
gets shaken off, and the pure truth goes forth to 
conquer. In this way all the great ideas of relig- 
ion, of philanthropy, have gone their round. Yet 
every new truth of morals or religion which blesses 
the world conflicts with old notions, lays a new 
burthen on the men who first accept it; demands 
of them to lay aside old comforts, accept a hard 
name, endure the coldness of their friends, and 
feel the iron of the world. What a rough wind 
winnowed the early Christians and the Quakers ! 
They bear all that, and still the truth goes on. 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



57 



Soon it has philosophers to explain it, apologists 
to defend it, orators to set it forth, institutions 
to embody its sacred life. It is a new force in 
the world, and nothing can dislodge or withstand 
it. It was in this way that the ideas of Chris- 
tianity got a footing in the world. Between the 
enthusiasm of Peter and James at the Pente- 
cost, and the cool demonstrations of Clarke and 
Schleiermacher, what a world of experience there 
lay! 

Some four hundred years ago this truth began 
to be distinctly seen : Man has natural empire 
over all institutions ; they are for him, accidents 
of his development, not he for them. That is a 
very simple statement, each of you assents to it. 
But once it was a great new truth. See what it 
has led to. Martin Luther dimly saw its applica- 
tion to the Catholic Church, the institution that 
long had ruled over the souls of men. The Church 
gave way and recoiled before the tide of truth. 
That helpless truth, — see what it has done, what 
millions it has inspired, what institutions it has 
built, what men called into life! By and by men 
saw its application to the despotic state which long 
had ruled over the bodies and souls of men. Revo- 
lutions followed thick and fast in Holland, Eng- 
land, America and France, and one day all Europe 
and the world will be ablaze with that idea. Men 



58 



TRUTH AXD THE INTELLECT. 



opposed ; said one of the Stuarts, " It shall not 
cross the four seas of England " ; but it crossed 
the Stuart's neck, and drove his children from the 
faithful soil. It came to America, that idea so 
destructive at first, destined to be so creative and 
conservative. It brought our fathers here, grim 
and bearded men, full of the fear of God ; they 
little knew what fruit would come of their plant- 
ing. See the institutions which have sprung up 
on the soil then cumbered by a wilderness, and 
made hideous by wild beasts and wilder men. 
See what new ideas blossomed out of the old 
truth : All men have natural, equal, and un- 
alienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness ; — that was a new flower from the old 
stem. See the one-and-thirty States which have 
sprung up under the shadow of this great idea. 

That truth long since recognized as true, now 
proved expedient by experiment, goes back over 
the sea, following the track the Mayflower broke, 
and earnest nations welcome it to their bosom, 
that sovereign truth : Man is supreme over insti- 
tutions, not they over him. How it has thundered 
and lightened over Europe in the last few years ! 
It will beat to the dust many a godless throne, and 
the palm of peace shall occupy the ground once re- 
served for soldiers' feet ; here and there a city ditch 
of defence has already become a garden for the 
town. 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



59 



Here in America, men full of this truth rise up 
against ungodly customs, now become a law, and 
under this demand the freedom of the slave. See 
how it spreads! It cannot be written down, nor 
voted down, nor sneered and frowned down ; it 
cannot be put down by all the armies of the 
world. This truth belongs to the nature of man, 
and can only perish when the race gives up the 
ghost. Yet it is nothing but an idea ; it has no 
hands, no feet. The man who first set it agoing 
on the earth, — see what he has done ! Yet I doubt 
not the villagers around him thought the ale-house 
keeper was the more useful man ; and when beer 
fell a penny in the pot, or the priest put on a new 
cassock, many a man thought it was a more im- 
portant event than the first announcement of this 
truth to man. But is not the wise man stronger 
than all the foolish ? Truth is a part of the celes- 
tial machinery of God ; whoso puts that in gear 
for mankind has the Almighty to turn his wheel. 
When God turns the mill, who shall stop it ? 
There is a spark from the good God in us all. 

" 0, say that in our embers 
Is something that doth live, 
That nature yet remembers 
What was so fugitive." 

Methinks I see some thoughtful man, studious 
of truth, his intellectual piety writ on his tall pale 



60 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



brow, coming from the street, the field, or shop, 
pause and turn inward all his strength ; now he 
smiles as he gets glimpses of this bashful truth, 
which flies, yet wishes to be seen, — a daughter of 
the all-blessed God. It is at her beauty that he 
* smiles, the thought of kindred loveliness, she is to 
people earth withal. And then the smile departs, 
and a pale sadness settles down upon his radiant 
face, as he remembers that men water their gar- 
dens for each new plant with blood, and how 
much must be spent to set a truth like this ! He 
shows his thought to other men, they keep it nes- 
tled in the family awhile. In due time the truth 
has come of age, and must take possession of the 
estate. Now she wrestles with the Roman Church ; 
the contest is not over yet, but the deadly wound 
will never heal. Now she wrestles with the North- 
ern kings; see how they fall, their sceptres broken, 
their thrones overturned ; and the fair-faced daugh- 
ter of the Eternal King leads forward happy tribes 
of men, and with pious vow inaugurates the 
chiefs of peace, of justice, and of love, and on the 
one great gospel of the human heart swears them 
to keep the constitution of the universe, written 
by God's own hand. 

But this last is only prophecy ; men say it can- 
not be. The slaves of America must be bondmen 
for ever ; the nations of Europe can never be free. 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



61 



I laugh at such a word. Let me know a thing is 
true, I know it has the omnipotence of God on 
its side, and fear no more for it than I fear for 
God. Politics is the science of exigencies. The 
eternal truth of things is the exigency which con- 
trols the science of men as the science of matter. 
Depend upon it, the Infinite God is one of the 
exigencies not likely to be disregarded in the ulti- 
mate events of human development. Truth shall 
fail out of geometry and politics at the same 
time ; only we learn first the simpler forms of 
truth. Now folly, passion, and fancied interest 
pervert the eye, which cannot always fail to see. 

Truth is the object of the intellect; by human 
wisdom we learn the thought of God, and are in- 
spired by his mind, — not all of us with the same 
mode, or form, or quantity of truth ; but each 
shall have his own, proportionate to his native 
powers and to the use he makes thereof. Love 
of truth is the intellectual part of piety. Wisdom 
is needful to complete and manly religion ; a thing 
to be valued for itself, not barely for its use. Love 
of the use will one day give place to love of truth 
itself. 

To keep the body's law brings health and 
strength, and in the long ages brings beauty too ; 
to keep the laws of mind brings in the higher in- 

6 



62 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



tellectual health and strength and loveliness, as 
much nobler than all corporeal qualities as the 
mind is nobler than the muscles it controls. Truth 
will follow from the lawful labor of the mind, 
and serve the great interest of men. Many a 
thousand years hence, when we are forgotten, 
when both the Englands have perished out of 
time, and the Anglo-Saxon race is only known as 
the Cherethites and Pelethites, — nothing national 
left but the name, — the truths we have slowly 
learned will be added to the people that come 
after us ; the great political truth of America will 
go round the world, and clothe the earth with 
greenness and with beauty. All the power of 
mind that we mature and give examples of shall 
also survive ; in you and me it will be personally 
immortal, — a portion of our ever-widening con- 
sciousness, though all the earthly wisdom of Leib- 
nitz or Aristotle must soon become a single drop 
in the heavenly ocean of the sages whom death 
has taught ; but it will be not less enduring on 
the earth, humanly immortal ; for the truths you 
bring to light are dropped into the world's wide 
treasury, — where Socrates and Kant cast in but 
two mites, which made only a farthing in the 
wealth of man, ■ — and form a part of the heritage 
which each generation receives, enlarges, holds in 
trust, and of necessity bequeathes to mankind, the 



TRUTH AXD THE INTELLECT. 



63 



personal estate of man entailed of nature to the 
end of time. As the men who discovered corn, 
tamed the ox, the horse, invented language and 
letters, who conquered fire and water, and yoked 
these two brute furious elements with an iron 
bond, as gentle now as any lamb, — as they who 
tamed the lightning, sending it of their errands, 
and as they who sculptured loveliness in stone 
two thousand years ago, a thing of beauty and 
a joy for ever, — as these and all such transmit 
their wealthy works to man, so he who sets forth a 
truth and develops wisdom, any human excellence 
of gift or growth, greatens the spiritual glory of 
his race. And a single man, who could not make 
one hair white or black, has added a cubit to the 
stature of mankind. 

All the material riches inherited or actively ac- 
quired by this generation, our cultivated land, our 
houses, roads of earth, of wood, of iron, our facto- 
ries and ships, — mechanical inventions which 
make New England more powerful than Russia 
to create, though she have forty-fold our men, — 
all these contrivances, the crown-jewels of the hu- 
man race, the symbols of our kingly power over 
the earth, we leave to the next age; your chil- 
dren's burden will be lighter, their existence larger, 
and their joy more delightful, for our additions to 
this heritage. But the spiritual truths we learn, 



64 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 



the intellectual piety which we acquire, all the 
manly excellence that we slowly meditate and 
slowly sculpture into life, goes down in blessing 
to mankind, the cup of gold hid in the sack of 
those who only asked for corn, richer than all the 
grain they bought. Into our spiritual labors other 
men shall enter, climb by our ladder, then build 
anew, and so go higher up towards heaven than 
you or I had time and power to go. There is a 
spiritual solidarity of the human race, and the 
thought of the first man will help the wisdom of 
the last. A thousand generations live in you and 
me. 

It is an old world, mankind is no new creation, 
no upstart of to-day, but has lived through hard 
times and long. Yet what is the history of man 
to the nature that is in us all ! The instinctive 
hunger for perfect knowledge will not be contented 
with repetitions of the remembered feast. There 
are new truths to come, — truths in science, morals, 
politics, religion ; some have arrived not long ago 
upon this planet, — many a new thing underneath 
the sun. At first men give them doubtful welcome. 
But if you know that they are truths, fear not; 
be sure that they will stay, adding new treasures 
to the consciousness of men, new outward wel- 
fare to the blessedness of earth. No king nor 
conqueror does men so great a good as he who 



TRUTH AND THE INTELLECT. 65 

adds to human kind a great and universal truth ; 
he that aids its march, and makes the thought a 
thing, works in the same line with Moses, has 
intellectual sympathy with God, and is a fellow- 
laborer with him. The best gift we can bestow 
upon man is manhood. Undervalue not material 
things; but remember that the generation which, 
finding Rome brick, left it marble and full of 
statues and temples too, as its best achievement 
bequeathed to us a few words from a young Car- 
penter of Galilee, and the remembrance of his 
manly life. 



6* 



III. 



OF JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



turx AND do justice. — Tobit xiii. 6. 

Everywhere in the world there is a natural 
law, that is a constant mode of action, which 
seems to belong to the nature of things, to the 
constitution of the universe ; this fact is universal. 
In different departments we call this mode of 
action by different names, as the law of Matter, 
or the law of Mind, the law of Morals, and the 
like. We mean thereby a certain mode of action 
which belongs to the material, mental, or moral 
forces, the mode in which commonly they are seen 
to act, and in which it is their ideal to act always. 
The ideal laws of matter we only know from the 
fact that they are always obeyed ; to us the actual 
obedience is the only witness of the ideal rule, for 
in respect to the conduct of the material world the 
ideal and the actual are the same. 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



67 



The laws of matter we can learn only by observa- 
tion and experience. We cannot divine them and 
anticipate, or know them at all, unless experience 
supply the facts of observation. Before experi- 
ence of the fact, no man could foretell that a fall- 
ing body would descend sixteen feet the first sec- 
ond, twice that the next, four times the third, and 
sixteen times the fourth. The law of falling 
bodies is purely objective to us ; no mode of action 
in our consciousness anticipates this rule of action 
in the outer world. The same is true of all the 
laws of matter. The ideal law is known because 
it is a fact. The law is imperative; it must be 
obeyed, without hesitation. In the solar system, 
or the composition of a diamond, no margin is left 
for any oscillation of disobedience ; margins of 
oscillation there always are, but only for vibration 
as a function, not as the refusal of a function. 
Only the primal will of God works in the material 
world, no secondary finite will. 

In nature, the world spread out before the 
senses, — to group many specific modes of action 
about a single generic force, — we see there is the 
great general law of attraction, which binds atom to 
atom in a grain of sand, orb to orb, system to sys- 
tem, gives unity to the world of things, and rounds 
these worlds of systems to a universe. At first 
there seem to be exceptions to this law, — as in 



68 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



growth and decomposition, in the repulsions of 
electricity ; but at length all these are found to be 
instantial cases of this great law of attraction 
acting in various modes. We name the attraction 
by its several modes, — cohesion in small masses, 
and gravitation in large. When the relation 
seems a little more intimate, we call it affinity, 
as in the atomic union of molecules of matter. 
Other modes we name electricity, and magnetism ; 
when the relation is yet more close and intimate, 
we call it vegetation in plants, vitality in animals. 
But for the present purpose all these may be 
classed under the general term Attraction, con- 
sidered as acting in various modes of cohesion, 
gravitation, affinity, vegetation, and vitality. 

This power gives unity to the material world, 
keeps it whole, yet, acting under such various 
forms, gives variety at the same time. The variety 
of effects surprises the senses at first; but in the 
end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated 
mind. Looked at in reference to this globe, an 
earthquake is no more than a chink that opens 
in a garden-walk, of a dry day in summer. A 
sponge is porous, having small spaces between the 
solid parts ; the solar system is only more porous, 
having larger room between the several orbs ; the 
universe yet more so, with vast spaces between 
the systems ; a similar attraction keeps together 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



69 



the sponge, the system, and the universe. Every 
particle of matter in the world is related to each 
and all the other particles thereof; attraction is 
the common bond. 

In the spiritual world, the world of human con- 
sciousness, there is also a law, an ideal mode of 
action for the spiritual force of man. To take 
only the moral part of this sphere of consciousness, 
we find the phenomenon called Justice, the law of 
right. Viewed as a force, it bears the same rela- 
tion in the world of conscience, that attraction 
bears in the world of sense. I mean justice is 
the normal relation of men, and has the same to 
do amongst moral atoms, — individual men, — 
moral masses, — that is, nations, — and the moral 
whole, — I mean all mankind, — which attraction 
has to do with material atoms, masses, and the 
material whole. It appears in a variety of forms 
not less striking. 

However, unlike attraction, it does not work 
free from all hindrance ; it develops itself through 
conscious agents, that continually change, and 
pass by experiment from low to high degrees of 
life and development, to higher forms of justice. 
There is a certain private force, personal and pe- 
culiar to each one of us, controlled by individual 
will; this may act in the same line with the great 
normal force of justice, or it may conflict for a 



70 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



time with the general law of the universe, having 
private nutations, oscillations, and aberrations, per- 
sonal or national. But these minor forces, after a 
while, are sure to be overcome by the great gen- 
eral moral force, pass into the current, and be 
borne along in the moral stream of the universe. 

What a variety of men and women in the 
world! Two hundred million persons, and no two 
alike in form and lineament! in character and 
being how unlike ! how very different as phe- 
nomena and facts ! What an immense variety 
of wish, of will, in these thousand million men ! 
of plans, which now rise up in the little personal 
bubble that we call a reputation or a great for- 
tune, then in the great national bubble which we 
call a state! for bubbles they are, judging by the 
space and time they occupy in this great and age- 
outlasting sea of human kind. But underneath 
all these bubbles, great and little, resides the same 
eternal force which they shape into this or the 
other special form ; and over all the same pater- 
nal Providence presides, and keeps eternal watch 
above the little and the great, producing variety 
of effect from unity of force. This Providence 
allows the little bubbles of his child's caprice, 
humors him in forming them, gives him time and 
space for that, understands his little caprices and 
his whims, and lets him carry them out awhile : 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



71 



but Himself, with no whim and no caprice, rales 
there as universal justice, omniscient and all-pow- 
erful. Out of His sea these bubbles rise ; by His 
force they rise ; by His law they have their con- 
sistence, and the private personal will, which gives 
them size or littleness and normal or abnormal 
shape, has its limitation of error marked out for 
it which cannot be passed by. In this human 
world there is a wide margin for oscillation ; refusal 
to perform the ideal function has been provided 
for, redundance made to balance deficiency; checks 
are provided for every form of abnormal action of 
the will. 

Viewed as an object not in man, justice is the 
constitution or fundamental law of the moral uni- 
verse, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man 
in all his moral relations. Accordingly all human 
affairs must be subject to that as the law para- 
mount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, 
what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohe- 
sions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, 
must all be subordinate to this universal gravita- 
tion towards the eternal right. 

We learn the laws of matter, that of attraction, 
for example, by observation and reflection ; what 
we know thereof is the result of long experience, 
— the experienced sight and the experienced 



72 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



thought of many a thousand years. We might 
learn something of the moral law of justice, the 
law of right, in the same way, as a merely exter- 
nal thing. Then we should know it as a phe- 
nomenon, as we know attraction ; as a fact so 
general, that we called it universal, and a law of 
nature. Still it would be deemed only an arbi- 
trary law, over us, indeed, but not in us, — or in our 
elements, not our consciousness, — which we must 
be subordinate to, but could not become coordi- 
nate with ; a law like that of falling bodies, which 
had no natural relation with us, which we could 
not anticipate or divine by our nature, but only 
learn by our history. We should not know why 
God had made the world after the pattern of jus- 
tice, and not injustice, any more than we now 
know why a body does not fall as rapidly the first 
as the last second of its descent. 

But God has given us a moral faculty, the con- 
science, which is able to perceive this law directly 
and immediately, by intuitive perception thereof, 
without experience of the external consequences 
of keeping or violating it, and more perfectly than 
such experience can ever disclose it. For the facts 
of man's history do not fully represent the faculties 
of his nature, as the history of matter represents 
the qualities of matter. Man, though finite, is 
indefinitely progressive, continually unfolding the 



JUSTICE AND THE COXSCIEXCE. 



73 



qualities of his nature ; his history, therefore, is 
not the whole book of man, but only the portion 
thereof which has been opened and publicly read. 
So the history of man never completely represents 
his nature ; and a law derived merely from the facts 
of observation by no means describes the normal 
rule of action which belongs to his nature. The 
laws of matter are known to us because they are 
kept; there the ideal and actual are the same ; but 
man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher 
than what he has come up to, — an ideal of nature 
which shames his actual of history. Observation 
and reflection only give us the actual of morals ; 
conscience, by gradual and successive intuition, 
presents us the ideal of morals. On condition that 
I use this faculty in its normal activity, and in 
proportion as I develop it and all its kindred 
powers, I learn justice, the law of right, the divine 
rule of conduct for human life ; I see it, not as an 
external fact which might as well not be at all as 
be, or might have been supplanted by its opposite, 
but I see it as a mode of action which belongs to 
the infinitely perfect nature of God ; belongs also 
to my own nature, and so is not barely over me, 
but in me, of me, and for me. I can become co- 
ordinate with that, and not merely subordinate 
thereto ; I find a deep, permanent, and instinctive 
"delight in justice, not only in the outward effects* 
7 



74 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



but in the inward cause, and by my nature I love 
this law of right, this rule of conduct, this justice, 
with a deep and abiding love. I find that justice 
is the object of my conscience, fitting that as light 
the eye and truth the mind. There is a perfect 
agreement between the moral object and the moral 
subject. Finding it fits me thus, I know that jus- 
tice will work my welfare and that of all mankind. 

Attraction is the most general law in the mate- 
rial world, and prevents a schism in the universe ; 
temperance is the law of the body, and prevents 
a schism in the members ; justice is the law of 
conscience, and prevents a schism in the moral 
world, amongst individuals in a family, communi- 
ties in a state, or nations in the world of men. 
Temperance is corporeal justice, the doing right to 
each limb of the body, and is the mean propor- 
tional between appetite and appetite, or one and 
all ; sacrificing no majority to one desire, however 
great, — no minority, however little, to a majority, 
— but giving each its due, and all the harmonious 
and well-proportioned symmetry that is meet for 
all. It keeps the proportions betwixt this and that, 
and holds an even balance within the body, so 
that there shall be no excess. Justice is moral tem- 
perance in the world of men. It keeps just rela- 
tions between men ; one man, however little, must 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



75 



not be sacrificed to another, however great, to a 
majority, or to all men. It holds the balance be- 
twixt nation and nation, for a nation is but a 
larger man ; betwixt a man and his family, tribe, 
nation, race ; between mankind and God. It is 
the universal regulator which coordinates man with 
man, each with all, — me with the ten hundred 
millions of men, so that my absolute rights and 
theirs do not interfere, nor our ultimate interests 
ever clash, nor my eternal welfare prove antago- 
nistic to the blessedness of all or any one. I am to 
do justice, and demand that of all, — a universal 
human debt, a universal human claim. 

But it extends further ; it is the regulator be- 
tween men and God. It is the moral spontane- 
ousness of the Infinite God, as it is to be the moral 
volition of finite men. The right to the justice of 
God is unalienable in men, the universal human 
claim, the never-ending gift for them. Can God 
ever depart from his own justice, deprive any 
creature of a right, or balk it of a natural claim ? 
Philosophically speaking, it is impossible, — a con- 
tradiction to our idea of God ; religiously speak- 
ing, it is impious, — a contradiction to our feeling 
of God. Both the philosophic and the religious 
consciousness declare it impossible that God 
should be unjust. The nature of finite men 
claims justice of God ; His infinite nature adjusts 



76 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



the claim. Every man in the world is morally 
related to each and all the rest. Justice is the 
common human bond. It joins us also to the in- 
finite God. Justice is his constant mode of action 
in the moral world. 

So much for justice, viewed as objective ; as a 
law of the universe, the mode of action of the uni- 
versal moral force. 

Man naturally loves justice, for its own sake, as 
the natural object of his conscience. As the mind 
loves truth and beauty, so conscience loves the 
right ; it is true and beautiful to the moral facul- 
ties. Conscience rests in justice as an end, as the 
mind in truth. As truth is the side of God turned 
towards the intellect, so is justice the side of Him 
which conscience looks upon. Love of justice is 
the moral part of piety. 

When I am a baby, in my undeveloped moral 
state, I do not love justice, nor conform to it ; 
when I am sick, and have not complete control 
over this republic of nerves and muscles, I fail of 
justice, and heed it not ; when I am stung with 
beastly rage, blinded by passion, or over attracted 
from my proper sphere of affection, another man 
briefly possessing me, I may not love the absolute 
and eternal right, private capillary attraction con- 
flicting with the universal gravitation. But in my 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE* 



77 



maturity, in my cool and personal hours, when I 
am most myself, and the accidents of my bodily 
temperament and local surroundings are controlled 
by the substance of my manhood, then I love jus- 
tice with a firm, unwavering love. That is the 
natural fealty of my conscience to its liege-lord. 
Then I love justice, not for the consequences there- 
of, for bodily gain, but for itself, for the moral 
truth and loveliness thereof. Then if justice crown 
me I am glad, not merely with my personal feeling, 
because it is I who wear the crown, but because it 
is the crown of justice. If justice discrown and 
bind me down to infamy, I still am glad with all 
my moral sense; and joy in the universal justice, 
though I suffer with the private smart. Though all 
that is merely selfish and personal of me revolts, 
still what is noblest, what I hold in common with 
mankind and in common with God, bids me be 
glad if justice is done upon me ; to me or upon 
me, I know it is justice still, and though my pri- 
vate injustice be my foe, the justice of the universe 
is still my friend. God, acting in this universal 
mode of moral force, acts for me, and the prospect 
of future suffering has no terror. 

Men reverence and love justice. Conscience is 
loyal ; moral piety begins early, the ethical instinct 
prompting mankind, and in savage ages bringing 
out the lovely flower in some woman's character. 



78 JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 

where moral beauty has its earliest spring. Com- 
monly, men love justice a little more than truth ; 
they are more moral than intellectual ; have ideas 
of the conscience more than of the mind. This is 
not true of the more cultivated classes in any civil- 
ization, but of the mass of men in all ; their morals 
are better than their philosophy. They see more 
absolute truth with the moral than with the intel- 
lectual faculty. The instinct for the abstract just 
of will is always a little before the instinct for the 
abstract true of thought. This is the normal order 
of development. But in the artificial forms of 
culture, what is selfish and for one takes rank be- 
fore what is human and for all. So cultivated 
men commonly seek large intellectual power, as 
an instrument for their selfish purposes, and neg- 
lect and even hate to get a large moral power, the 
instrument of universal benevolence. They love 
the exclusive use of certain forms of truth, and 
neglect justice, which would make the convenience 
of every truth serve the common good of all. Men 
with large moral power must needs work for all ; 
with only large intellectual power they may work 
only for themselves. Hence crafty aristocracies 
and monopolists seek for intellectual culture as 
a mode of power, and shun moral culture, which 
can never serve a selfish end. This rule holds good 
of all the great forms of civilization, from the 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



79 



Egyptian to the British ; of all the higher semina- 
ries of education, from the Propaganda of the 
Jesuits to a New England college. In all the 
civilized nations at this day, the controlling class 
is intellectual more than moral ; has more power 
of thought than power of righteousness. The 
same fact appears in the literature of the world. 
The foremost class in culture, wealth, and social 
rank have less than the average proportion of 
morality. Hence comes the character of laws, 
political, social, and ecclesiastical institutions, — 
not designed for all, but for a few, at best a part, 
because the makers did not start with adequate 
moral power, nor propose justice as an end. 

Yet the mass of men are always looking for the 
just; all this vast machinery which makes up a 
state, a w r orld of states, is, on the part of the peo- 
ple, an attempt to organize justice ; the minute 
and wide-extending civil machinery which makes 
up the law and the courts, with all their officers 
and implements, on the part of mankind, is chiefly 
an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right. 
Alas ! with the leaders of civil and political af- 
fairs it is quite different, often an organization of 
selfishness. Mankind reaches out after the abso- 
lute right, makes its constitutions to establish jus- 
tice, and provide for the common defence. We 
" report the decisions of wise men, and of courts ; 



80 



JUSTICE 



AND THE 



CONSCIENCE. 



we keep the record of cases decided, to help us 
judge more wisely in time to come. The nation 
would enact laws : it aims to get the justest men 
in the state, that they may incorporate their aggre- 
gate sense of right into a statute. We set twelve 
honest men to try an alleged offender ; they are to 
apply their joint justice to the special case. The 
people wish law to be embodied justice, adminis- 
tered without passion. I know the government 
seldom desires this ; the people as seldom fail of 
the wish. Yet the mass of men commonly at- 
tribute their own moral aims to every great leader. 
Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness 
and injustice of their rulers, not a government 
would stand a year. The world would ferment 
with universal revolution. 

In savage times, duelling and private revenge 
grew out of this love of justice. They were rude 
efforts after the right. In its name a man slew 
his father's murderer, or, failing thereof, left the 
reversion of his vengeance as a trust in the hands 
of his own son, to be paid to the offender or his 
heir. With the Norsemen it was deemed a crime 
against society to forgive a grievous wrong, and 
" nidding " is a word of contempt to this day. It 
was not merely personal malice which led to pri- 
vate revenge ; which bade the Scottish mother 
train up one son after another filled with a theo- 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



81 



logical hatred against their father's murderer ; not 
a private and selfish lust of vengeance alone 
which sustained her after the eldest and then the 
next of age perished in the attempt, and filled her 
with a horrid joy when the third succeeded. It 
was " wild justice " in a wild age, but always 
mixed with passion, and administered in hate ; 
private vengeance edged the axe with which wild 
justice struck the blow. Even now, in the ruder 
portions of America, South and West, where the 
common law is silent, and of statutes there are 
none, or none enforced, when a wrong is done, the 
offended people come forth and hold their court, 
with summary process, brief and savage, to decree 
something like justice in a brutal way; rage fur- 
nishing the occasion, conscience is still the cause. 

All these things indicate a profound love of jus- 
tice inherent in mankind. It takes a rude form 
with rude men, is mixed with passion, private 
hate ; in a civilized community it takes a better 
form, and attempts are made to remove all per- 
sonal malice from the representatives of right. A 
few years ago men were surprised to see the peo- 
ple of a neighboring city for the first time choose 
their judges : common elections had been carried 
there by uncommon party tricks ; but when this 
grave matter came before the people, they laid off 
their party badges, and as men chose the best offi- 
cers for that distinguished trust. 



82 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



The people are not satisfied with any form of 
government, or statute law, until it comes up to 
their sense of justice ; so every progressive state 
revises its statutes from time to time, and at each 
revision comes nearer to the absolute right which 
human nature demands. Mankind revolutionizes 
constitutions, changes and changes, seeking to 
come close to the ideal justice, the divine and im- 
mutable law of the world, to which we all owe 
fealty, swear how we will. 

In literature men always look for poetical justice, 
desiring that virtue should have its own reward, 
and vice appropriate punishment, not always out- 
ward, but always real, and made known to the 
reader. All readers of English history rejoice at 
the downfall of Judge Jeffries. In romances we 
love to read of some man or maid oppressed by 
outward circumstances, but victorious over them ; 
hawked at by villains whose foot is taken in their 
own snare. This is the principal charm in the bal- 
lads and people's poetry of England and Ger- 
many, and in the legends of Catholic countries. 
All men sympathize in the fate of Blue Beard, 
and " the guardian uncle fierce." The world has 
ready sympathy with the Homeric tale of Ulysses 
returning to his Penelope, long faithful, but not 
grown old with baffling the suitors for twenty 
years. It is his justice and humanity which give 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



S3 



such a wide audience to the most popular novelist 
of our day. But when a writer tries to paint vice 
beautiful, make sin triumphant, men shrink away 
from the poison atmosphere he breathes. Authors 
like Filmer, Machiavel, and Hobbes arouse the 
indignation of mankind. The fact of personal 
error it is easy to excuse, but mankind does not 
forgive such as teach the theory of sin. We 
always honor men who forget their immediate per- 
sonal interests, and use an author's sacred func- 
tion to bear witness to the right. 

The majority of men who think have an ideal 
justice better than the things about them, juster 
than the law. Some paint it behind them, on the 
crumbling walls of history, and tell us of " the 
good old times " ; others paint it before them, on 
the morning mist of youthful life, and in their 
prayers and in their daily toil strive after this, — 
their New Jerusalem. We all of us have this 
ideal ; our dream is fairer than our day ; we will 
not let it go. If the wicked prosper, it is but for 
a moment, say we ; the counsel of the froward 
shall be carried headlong. What an ideal democ- 
racy now floats before the eyes of earnest and 
religious men, — fairer than the " Republic " of 
Plato, or More's " Utopia," or the golden age of 
fabled memory! It is justice that we want to 
organize, — justice for all, for rich and poor. There 



84 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



the slave shall be free from his master. There 
shall be no want, no oppression, no fear of man, 
no fear of God, but only love. " There is a good 
time coming," — so we all believe when we are 
young and full of life and healthy hope. 

God has made man with the instinctive love of 
justice in him, which gradually gets developed in 
the world. But in Himself justice is infinite. This 
justice of God must appear in the world, and in 
the history of men ; and, after all " the wrongs that 
patient merit of the unworthy takes," still you see 
that the ploughshare of justice is drawn through 
and through the field of the world, uprooting the 
savage plants. The proverbs of the nations tell 
us this : " The mills of the gods grind slow, but 
they grind to powder " ; " 111 got ill spent " ; " The 
triumphing of the wicked is but for a moment"; 
" What the Devil gives, he also takes " ; " Honesty 
is the best policy " ; " No butter will stick to a bad 
man's bread." Sometimes these sayings come 
from the instinct of justice in man, and have a 
little ethical exaggeration about them, but yet 
more often they represent the world's experience 
of facts more than its consciousness of ideas. 

Look at the facts of the world. You see a con- 
tinual and progressive triumph of the right. I do 
not pretend to understand the moral universe, the 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



85 



arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. 
I cannot calculate the curve and complete the 
figure by the experience of sight ; I can divine it 
by conscience. But from what I see I am sure 
it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be 
mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he 
thought of slavery and remembered that God is 
just. Ere long all America will tremble. The 
Stuarts in England were tyrannical and strong: 
respectable and peaceful men kept still a while, 
and bore the tyranny, but men who loved God and 
his justice more than house and land fled to the 
wilderness, and built up a troublesome common- 
wealth of Puritans. Such as stayed at home en- 
deavored «for a while to submit to the wrong ; 
some of them made theories to justify it. But 
it could not be ; the tyranny became unbearable 
even to barons and bishops; one tyrant loses his 
head, another his crown ; no Stuart must tread 
again the English soil; legitimacy becomes a pre- 
tender. 

England would rule America, not for our good, 
but hers alone. We forgot the love which bound 
the two people into one family ; the obstinate injus- 
tice of the mother weakened the ties of language, 
literature, religion, — the Old England and the 
New read the same Bible, — kindred blood and 
institutions inherited from the same fathers ; we 

8 



86 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



thought only of the injustice ; and there was an 
ocean between us and the mother country. The 
fairest jewel fell from the British crown. 

In France, kings, nobles, clergy, trod the peo- 
ple down. Men bore it with the slow, sad patience 
of humanity, bore it out of regard for the " divinity 
that doth hedge a king," for the nobility of the 
noble, and the reverence of the priest. But in a 
few years outraged humanity forgot its slow, sad 
patience, and tore away this triple torment, — as 
Paul, escaped from wreck, shook off the viper 
from his hand, — and trod the venomous beast to 
dust. Napoleon came, king of the people. Justice 
was his word, his action for a while. The nation 
gathered about him, gave him their treasure and 
their trust. He was strong through the people's 
faith ; his foes fell before him, ancient thrones 
tottered and reeled, and came heavy to the ground. 
The name of justice, of the rights of man, shook 
down their thrones, and organized victory at every 
step. But he grows giddy with his height ; self- 
ishness takes the place of justice in his counsels; a 
bastard giant sits on the throne whence the people 
had hurled off " legitimate " oppression ; he fights 
no more the battles of mankind ; justice is exiled 
from his upstart court. The people fall away ; 
victory perches no more on his banner. The 
snows of Russia cut off his army, but it was 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



87 



his own injustice that brought Napoleon to the 
ground. Self-shorn of this great strength, the ablest 
monarch since Charlemagne sits down on a little 
island in the tropic sea, and dies upon that lonely 
rock, his life a warning, to bid mankind be just and 
not despise the Lord. No mightiness of genius 
could save him, cut off from the moral force of the 
human race. Can any tyrant prosper where such 
a master fell ? 

Look at the condition of Christendom at this 
day ; what tyrant sits secure ? Revolution is the 
Lynch-law of nations, and creates an anarchy, and 
then organizes its provisional government of mo- 
mentary despotism. It is a bloody process, but 
justice does not disdain a rugged road ; our King 
comes not always on an ass's colt. All Europe 
is, just now, in a great ferment; terrible questions 
are getting ready for a swift tribunal. Injustice 
cannot stand. No armies, no " Holy Alliance," 
can hold it up. Human nature is against it, and so 
is the nature of God ! " Justice has feet of wool," 
no man hears her step, " but her hands are of iron," 
and where she lays them down, only God can up- 
lift and unclasp. It is vain to trust in wrong: As 
much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of 
human history. 

I know men complain that sentence against an 
evil work is not presently executed. They see 



88 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



but half; it is executed, and with speed; every 
departure from justice is attended with loss to the 
unjust man, but the loss is not reported to the 
public. Sometimes a man is honored as a brave, 
good man, but trial rings him and he gives an 
empty, hollow sound. All the ancient and honor- 
able may bid the people trust him, — they turn off 
their affections from him. 

So have I seen an able man, witty and cunning, 
graceful, plausible, elegant, and rich ; men hon- 
ored him for a time, tickled by his beauty to eye 
and ear. But gradually the mean soul of the man 
appeared in his conduct, selfish, grasping, inhu- 
man, and fraudulently unjust. The public heart 
forgot him, and when he came to die, the town 
which once had honored him so much gave him 
earth to rest his coffin on. He got the official praises 
which he paid for, that was all. Silence is a figure 
of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly 
severe. How differently do men honor such as 
stood up for truth and right, and never shrank! 
What monuments the world builds to its patriots ! 
Four great statesmen, organizers of the right, em- 
balmed in stone, look down upon the lawgivers of 
France as they pass to their hall of legislation, 
silent orators to tell how nations love the just. 
What a monument Washington has built in the 
heart of America and all the world ! not by great 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



89 



genius, — he had none of that, — but by his effort 
to be just. The martyrs of Christendom, of Ju- 
daism, and of every form of heathen faith, — how 
men worship those firm souls who shook off their 
body sooner than be false to conscience. 

Yet eminent justice is often misunderstood. 
Littleness has its compensation. A small man 
is seldom pinched for want of room. Greatness 
is its own torment. There was once a man on 
this earth whom the world could not understand. 
He was too high for them, too wide, was every 
way too great. He came, the greatest moral 
genius of our history, to bless mankind. Men 
mocked him, gave him a gallows between two 
thieves. " Saviour, save thyself," said they, as they 
shot out the lip at him. " Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do ! " was the manly 
answer to the brutal taunt. Now see how the 
world avenges its conscience on itself for this injus- 
tice : for sixteen hundred years men worship him 
as God throughout the Western World. His 
name goes like the morning sun around the earth, 
like that to waken beauty into life. This heart of 
ours is loyal; only let us see the man and know 
that he is King of righteousness, and we will do 
him homage all our days. 

But we do not see that justice is always done 
on earth ; many a knave is rich, sleek, and hoa- 

8 * 



90 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



ored, while the just man is poor, hated, and in 
torment. The Silesian merchant fattens on the 
weavers' tears, and eats their children's bones. 
Three million slaves earn the enjoyment of Ameri- 
cans, who curse them in the name of Christ ; in 
the North, capital is a tyrant over labor. How 
sad is the condition of the peasantry of Christen- 
dom ! The cry of a world of suffering, from Abel 
to the slaves of America, comes up to our ear, and 
the instinct of justice paints a world beyond the 
grave, where exact justice shall be done to all and 
each, to Abel and to Cain. The moral instinct, 
not satisfied on earth, reaches out to the future 
world, and in an ideal heaven would realize ideal 
justice. But even there the tyranny of able-minded 
men has interfered, painting immortality in such 
guise that it would be a curse to mankind. Yet 
the instinct of justice prevails above it all, and few 
men fear to meet the eternal Mother of us all in 
heaven. 

We need a great and conscious development of 
the moral element in man, and a corresponding ex- 
pansion of justice in human affairs ; an intentional 
application thereof to individual, domestic, social, 
ecclesiastical, and political life. In the old mili- 
tary civilization that was not possible ; in the 
present industrial civilization it is not thought de- 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



91 



sirable by the mercantile chiefs of church and 
state. Hitherto, the actual function of govern- 
ment, so far as it has been controlled by the will 
of the rulers, has commonly been this : To foster 
the strong at the expense of the weak, to protect 
the capitalist and tax the laborer. The powerful 
have sought a monopoly of development and en- 
joyment, loving to eat their morsel alone. Accord- 
ingly, little respect is paid to absolute justice by 
the controlling statesmen of the Christian world. 
Not conscience and the right is appealed to, but 
prudence and the expedient for to-day. Justice is 
forgotten in looking at interest, and political mo- 
rality neglected for political economy ; instead of 
national organization of the ideal right, we have 
only national housekeeping. Hence the great evils 
of civilization at this day, and the questions of 
humanity, so long adjourned and put off, that it 
seems they can only be settled with bloodshed. 
Nothing rests secure save in the law of God. The 
thrones of Christian Europe tremble ; a little touch 
and they fall. Capitalists are alarmed, lest gold ill 
got should find an equilibrium. Behind the ques- 
tion of royalty, nobility, slavery, — relics of the old 
feudalism, — there are other questions yet more 
radical, soon to be asked and answered. 

There has been a foolish neglect of moral cul- 
ture throughout all Christendom. The leading 



92 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



classes have not valued it ; with them the mind 
was thought better than the moral sense, and con- 
science a dowdy. It is so in all the higher educa- 
tion of New England, as of Europe. These men 
seek the uses of truth, not truth itself; they scorn 
duty and its higher law ; to be ignorant and weak- 
minded is thought worse than to be voluntarily 
unjust and wicked ; idiocy of conscience is often 
thought an excellence, is never out of fashion. 
Morality is thought no part of piety in the Church, 
it " saves " no man ; belief does that with the Prot- 
estants, sacraments with the Catholics ; it is no 
part of politics in the state, — not needed to save 
the nation or the soul. 

Of late years there has been a great expansion 
of intellectual development in Europe and Ameri- 
ca. Has the moral development kept pace with 
it ? Is the desire to apply justice to its universal 
function as common and intense with the more 
intellectual classes, as the desire to apply special 
truths to their function ? By no means. We 
have organized our schemes of intellectual cul- 
ture : it is the function of schools, colleges, learned 
societies, and all the special institutions for agri- 
culture, manufactures, and commerce, to develop 
the intellect and apply it to various concrete in- 
terests. No analogous pains have been taken with 
the culture of conscience. France has the only 



\ 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 93 

academy for moral science in the Christian world ! 
We have statistical societies for interest, no moral 
societies for justice. "We rely only on the moral 
instinct ; its development is accidental, not a con- 
siderable part of our plan ; or else is involuntary, 
no part of the will of the most intellectual class. 
There is no college for the conscience. 

Do the churches accomplish this educational 
purpose for the moral sense ? The popular clergy 
think miracles better than morality ; and have 
even less justice than truth. They justify the pop- 
ular sins in the name of God ; are the allies of 
despotism in all its forms, military or industrial. 
Oppression by the sword and oppression by capi- 
tal successively find favor with them. In America 
there are two common ecclesiastical defences of 
African slavery : The negroes are the descendants 
of Ham, who laughed at his father Noah, — over- 
taken with drink, — and so it is right that Ham's 
children, four thousand years later, should be 
slaves to the rest of the world ; Slavery teaches the 
black men " our blessed religion." Such is eccle- 
siastical justice ; and hence judge the value of the 
churches to educate the conscience of mankind. 
It is strange how little the clergy of Christendom, 
for fifteen hundred years, have done for the moral- 
ity of the world ; much for decorum, little for jus- 
tice ; a deal for ecclesiastical economy, but what 



94 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



for ecclesiastical righteousness ? They put worship 
with the knee before the natural piety of the con- 
science. " Trusting in good works " is an offence 
to the Christian Church, as well Protestant as 
Catholic. 

In Europe the consequences of this defect of 
moral culture have become alarming, even to such 
as fear only for money. That intellectual culture, 
which was once the cherished monopoly of the rich, 
has got diffused amongst wide ranks of men, who 
once sat in the shadow of intellectual darkness. 
There is no development of conscience to corre- 
spond therewith. The Protestant clergy have not 
enlightened the people on the science of religion. 
The Catholics had little light to spare, and that 
was spent in exhibiting " the holy coat of Treves," 
or images of the Virgin, and in illuminating cardi- 
nals and popes. No pains, or little, have been 
taken with the moral culture of the people ; none 
scientifically and for the sake of justice and hu- 
man kind. So the selfishness of the rich has spread 
with their intellectual culture. The few have long 
demanded a monopoly for themselves, and with 
their thunder blasted the mortal life of the prophets 
of justice sent by God to establish peace on earth 
and good-will amongst men. Now the many be- 
gin to demand a monopoly for themselves. Edu- 
cation, wealth, political power, w r as once a privi- 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



95 



lege, and they who enjoyed it made this their 
practical motto : " Down with the poor ! " The 
feudal system fell before Dr. Faustus and his print- 
ing press. Military civilization slowly gives way 
to industrial. Common schools teach men to read. 
The steam-press cheapens literature ; the compli- 
cated tools of modern industry make the shop a 
college for the understanding ; the laborer is goad- 
ed by his hate of wrong, which is the passion of 
morality, as love of right is the affection thereof; 
— he sees small respect for justice in church or 
state. What shall save him from the selfishness 
about him, long dignified as philosophy, sanctified 
as religion, and reverenced as the law of God! 
Do you wonder at " atheism " in Germany ; at 
communism in France ? Such " atheism " is the 
theory of the Church made popular ; the worst com- 
munism is only the principle of monopoly trans- 
lated out of aristocracy into democracy ; the song 
of the noble in the people's mouth. The hideous 
cry, "Down with the rich!" — is that an aston- 
ishment to the leaders of Europe, who have trod 
down the poor these thousand years ? When ig- 
norance, moral and intellectual stupidity, brought 
only servile obedience from the vassal, the noble 
took delight in the oppression which trod his broth- 
er down. Now numbers are power ; that is the 
privilege of the people, and if the people, the privi- 



96 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



leged class of the future, have the selfishness of the 
aristocracy, what shall save the darling dollars of 
the rich ? " They that laughed at the grovelling 
worm, and trod on him, may cry and howl when 
they see the stoop of the flying and fiery-mouthed 
dragon ! " 

The leaders of modern civilization have scorned 
justice. The chiefs of war, of industry, and the 
Church are joined in a solidarity of contempt ; 
in America, not harlots, so much as statesmen, 
debauch the land. Conscience has been left out 
of the list of faculties to be intentionally devel- 
oped in the places of honor. Is it marvellous if 
men find their own selfishness fall on their own 
heads? No army of special constables will supply 
the place of morality in the people. If they do 
not reverence justice, what shall save the riches of 
the rich? Ah me! even the dollar flees to the 
Infinite God for protection, and bows before the 
higher law its worshippers despise. 

"What moral guidance do the leading classes of 
men offer the people in either England, — the Eu- 
ropean or American ? Let the laboring men of 
Great Britain answer ; let Ireland, about to perish, 
groan out her reply ; let the three million African 
slaves bear the report to Heaven. " Ignorance is 
the mother of devotion," once said some learned 
fool ; monopolists act on the maxim. Ignorance 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



97 



of truth, ignorance of right, — will these be good di- 
rectors, think you, of the class which has the privi- 
lege of numbers and their multitudinous agglom- 
erated power? "Reverence the eternal right,' 5 
says Conscience, "that is moral piety !" "Reap 
as you sow,'' quoth human History. Alas for a 
church without righteousness, and a state without 
right ! All history shows their fate ! What is false 
to justice cannot stand ; what is true to that can- 
not perish. Nothing can save wrong. 

A sentence is written against all that is unjust, 
written by God in the nature of man and the 
nature of the universe, because it is in the nature 
of the Infinite' God. Fidelity to your faculties, 
trust in their convictions, that is justice to your- 
self; a life in obedience thereto, that is justice to- 
wards men. Tell me not of successful wrong. 
The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffer- 
ing. Iniquity seems to prosper, but its success is 
its defeat and shame. The knave deceives him- 
self. The miser, starving his brother's body, starves 
also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of 
his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and 
miserable. Whoso escapes a duty avoids a gain. 
Outward judgment often fails, inward justice 
never. Let a man try to love the wrong, and do 
the wrong, it is eating stones, and not bread ; the 
swift feet of justice are upon him, following with 

9 



98 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



woollen tread, and her iron hands are round his 
neck. No man can escape from this, no more 
than from himself. 

At first sight of the consequences of justice, re- 
dressing the evils of the world, its aspect seems 
stern and awful. Men picture the palace of this 
king as hell : there is torment and anguish ; the 
waters are in trouble. The car of justice seems 
a car of Juggernaut crushing the necks of men ; 
they cry for mercy. But look again : the stern- 
ness all is gone ; nothing is awful there ; the pal- 
ace of justice is all heaven, as before a hell ; the 
water is troubled only by an angel, and to heal the 
sick ; the fancied car of Juggernaut is the trium- 
phal chariot of mankind riding forth to welfare ; 
with swift and noiseless feet justice follows the 
transgressor and clutches the iron hand about his 
neck. It was to save him that she came with 
swift and noiseless tread. This is the angel of 
God that flies from east to west, and where she 
stoops her broad wings it is to bring the counsel 
of God, and feed mankind with angels' bread. As 
an eagle stirreth up her nest, from her own beak 
to feed its young, broods over their callow frame, 
and bears them on her wings, teaching them first 
to fly, so comes justice unto men. 

Sometimes men fear that justice will fail, wick- 
edness appears so strong. On its side are the ar- 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



99 



mies, the thrones of power, the riches, and the glory 
of the world. Poor men crouch down in despair. 
Shall justice fail and perish out from the world of 
men? shall any thing that is wrong continually 
endure ? "When attraction fails out of the world 
of matter, when God fails and there is no God, 
then shall justice fail, then shall wrong be able 
continually to endure ; not till then. 

The unity of the material world is beautiful, 
kept by attraction's universal force ; temperance in 
the body has fair effects, and wisdom in the mind. 
The face of nature, how fair it is ; the face of 
strong and healthy, beauteous manhood is a dear 
thing to look upon. To intellectual eyes, the coun- 
tenance of truth has a majestic charm. Wise 
men, with cultivated mind, understanding, imag- 
ination, reason well developed, discovering and 
disclosing truth and beauty to mankind, are a fair 
spectacle. But I love the moral side of Deity yet 
more ; love God as justice. His justice, our mo- 
rality working with that, shall one day create a 
unity amongst all men more fair than the face of 
nature, and add a wondrous beauty, wondrous 
happiness, to this great family of men. Will you 
fear lest a wrong should prove immortal? So far 
as any thing is false, or wrong, it is weak; so far 
as true and right, is omnipotently strong. Never 
fear that a just thought shall fail to be a thing ; the 



100 



JUSTICE AND THE CONSCIENCE. 



power of God, the wisdom of God, and the justice 
of God are on its side, and it cannot fail, — no 
more than God himself can perish. Wrong is the 
accident of human development. Right is of the 
substance of humanity, justice the goal we are to 
reach. 

But in human affairs the justice of God must 
work by human means. Men are the measures of 
God's principles; our morality the instrument of 
his justice, which stilleth alike the waves of the sea, 
the tumult of the people, and the oppressors brutal 
rage. Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of 
man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of 
mankind. The ideal must become actual, God's 
thought a human thing, made real in a reign of 
righteousness, and a kingdom — no, a Common- 
wealth — of justice on the earth. You and I can 
help forward that work. God will not disdain to 
use our prayers, our self-denial, and the little atoms 
of justice that personally belong to us, to establish 
his mighty work, — the development of mankind. 

You and I may work with Him, and, as on the 
floor of the Pacific Sea little insects lay the foun- 
dation of firm islands, slowly uprising from the 
tropic wave, so you and I in our daily life, in 
house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may pre- 
pare the way for the republic of righteousness, the 
democracy of justice that is to come, Our own 



JUSTICE AND THE 



CONSCIENCE. 



101 



morality shall bless us here; not in our outward 
life alone, but in the inward and majestic life of 
conscience. All the justice we mature shall bless 
us here, yea, and hereafter; but at our death we 
leave it added to the common store of humankind. 
Even the crumbs that fall from our table may 
save a brother's life. You and I may help deepen 
the channel of human morality in which God's 
justice runs, and the wrecks of evil, which now 
check the stream, be borne off the sooner by the 
strong, all-conquering tide of right, the river of God 
that is full of blessing. 



9* 



IV. 



OF LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



LOVE IS OF GOD. — 1 JollTl IV. 7. 

Conscience deals with universal principles of 
morals. It has for its object justice, the divine law 
of the world, to be made ideal in the conscious- 
ness of mankind, and then actual in the facts 
of our condition and history. The affections deal 
with persons; with nothing but persons, for ani- 
mate, and even inanimate, things get invested with 
a certain imaginary personality as soon as they 
become objects of affection. Ideas are the persons 
of the intellect, and persons the ideas of the heart. 
Persons are the central point of the affectional 
world. The love of persons is the function of the 
affections, as it is that of the mind and conscience 
to discover and accept truth and right. 

This love is a simple fact of consciousness ; a 
simple feeling, not capable of analysis, not easily 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



103 



described, yet not likely to be confounded with 
any other fact of consciousness, or simple feeling. 
It is not directly dependent on the will, so is free 
from all immediate arbitrariness and caprice of 
volition. It is spontaneous, instinctive, disinter- 
ested, not seeking the delight of the loving sub- 
ject, but of the object loved. So it is not a desire 
of enjoying, but of delighting. As we love truth 
for itself, justice for its own sake, so we love per- 
sons not for their use, but for themselves ; we love 
them independently of their convenience to us. 
Love is its own satisfaction ; it is the love of 
loving, not merely of enjoying, another. 

Such is love itself, described by its central char- 
acter ; but it appears in many forms, and is spe- 
cifically modified by the character and condition 
of the person loved, the object of affection ; by the 
person who loves, the loving subject, and by the 
various passions and emotions mingling therewith. 
So it appears as fraternal, filial, connubial, and 
parental love ; as friendship, love of a few ; as 
charity, love of the needy ; as patriotism, love of 
your nation ; and as philanthropy, the love of all 
mankind without respect to kin or country. In 
all these cases love is the same thing in kind, but 
modified specifically by other emotions which con- 
nect themselves with it. Love is the piety of 
the affections. 



104 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



Of course there are not only forms of love, 
where the quality is modified, but degrees which 
measure the different quantity thereof. The degree 
depends on the subject, and also on the object, of 
love. 

There is a state of consciousness in which we 
wish no ill to a man, but yet wish him no good. 
That is the point of affectional indifference. The 
first remove above that may be regarded as the 
lowest degree of love, hardly worthy of the name, 
a sort of zoophytic affection. You hardly know 
whether to call it love or not. 

The highest degree of love is that state of feeling 
in which you are willing to abandon all, your com- 
fort, convenience, and life, for the sake of another, 
to sacrifice your delight in him to his delight in 
you, and to do this not merely by volition, as an 
act of conscience, and in obedience to a sense 
of duty, — not merely by impulse, in obedience 
to blind feeling, as an act of instinct, — but to 
do all this consciously, yet delightedly, with a 
knowledge of the consequences, by a movement 
which is not barely instinctive, and not merely 
of the will, but spontaneous ; to do all this not 
merely out of gratitude for favors received, for a 
reward paid in advance, nor for the sake of hap- 
piness in heaven, a recompense afterwards, with 
no feeling of grateful obligation, no wish for a 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



105 



recompense, but from pure, entire, and disinter- 
ested affection. 

This highest ideal degree of love is sometimes 
attained, but, like all the great achievements of 
human nature, it is rare. There are few master- 
pieces in sculpture, painting, architecture, in poetry 
or music. The ideal and actual are seldom the 
same in any performance of mankind. It is rarely 
that human nature rises to its highest ideal mark ; 
some great hearts notch the mountains and leave 
their line high up above the heads of ordinary 
men, — a history and a prophecy. Yet the ca- 
pacity for this degree of love belongs to the nature 
of man as man. The human excellence which is 
actual in Jesus, is possible in Iscariot; give him 
time and opportunity, the man will appear in him 
also. I doubt not that the worst man ever hanged 
or even honored for his crime, will one day attain 
a degree of love which the loftiest men now can- 
not comprehend. This power of loving to this 
degree, it seems to me, is generic, of the nature of 
man ; the absence of it is a mark of immaturity, 
of greenness, and clownishness of the heart. But 
at this day the power of heart is distributed as 
diversely as power of mind or conscience, and so 
the faculty of loving is by no means the same in 
actual men. All are not at once capable of the 
same quantity of love. 



106 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



There are also different degrees of love occa- 
sioned by the character of the object of affection. 
All cannot receive the same quantity. Thus you 
cannot love a dog so well as a man, nor a base, 
mean man so much as a great, noble man, with the 
excellences of mind and conscience, heart and 
soul. Can you and I love an Arnold as well as a 
Washington ? a kidnapper as well as a philanthro- 
pist? God may do so, not you and L So with 
finite beings the degree of love is affected by the 
character of both the subject and the object of 
affection. 

It is unfortunate that we have but one word in 
English to express affectional action in respect 
to myself and to other men ; we speak of a man 
loving himself, and loving another. Bat it is plain 
that I cannot love myself at all in the sense that I 
love another; for self-love is intransitive, — subject 
and object are identical. It is one thing to desire 
my own delight, and something quite opposite to 
desire the delight of another. So, for the sake of 
clearness, I will use the words Self-love for the 
normal feeling of a man towards himself; Self- 
ishness for the abnormal and excessive degree 
of this ; and Love for the normal feeling towards 
others. 



LOVE 



AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



107 



Self-love is the lesser cohesive attraction which 
keeps the man whole and a unit, which is necessary 
for his consistency and existence as an individual 
It is a part of morality, and is to the man what 
impenetrability is to the atoms of matter, and what 
the centripetal force is to the orbs of heaven ; with- 
out it, the man's personality would soon be lost in 
the press of other men. 

Selfishness is the excess of this self-love; no 
longer merely conservative of myself, I become 
invasive, destructive of others, and appropriate 
what is theirs to my own purposes. 

Love is the greater gravitation which unites 
me to others ; the expansive and centrifugal power 
which extends my personality, and makes me find 
my delight in others, and desire them to have 
theirs in me. In virtue of this I feel for the sor- 
rows of another man ; they become, in some meas- 
ure, my sorrows, just in proportion to the degree 
of my love,; his joys also are my joys in just the 
same degree ; I am gladdened with his delights, 
honored in his honors ; and so my consciousness is 
multiplied by all the persons that I love, for my 
affectional personality is extended to them all, and 
with a degree of power exactly proportionate to 
my degree of love. So affection makes one man 
into many men, as it were. 



108 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



The highest action of any power is in combina- 
tion with all the rest. Yet there is much imper- 
fect action of the faculties, working severally, not 
jointly. The affections may act independent of 
the conscience, as it of them. It is related that 
an eminent citizen of Athens had a son who com- 
mitted an offence for which the law demanded the 
two eyes of the offender ; the father offered one of 
his to save one of his son's. Here his heart, not his 
conscience, prompted the deed. When the affec- 
tions thus control the conscience, we have the 
emotion called Mercy, which is the preponderance 
of love for a person, not love for right, of love of 
the concrete man over the abstract idea. In a 
normal condition, it seems to me that love of per- 
sons is a little in advance of love of the abstract 
right, and that spontaneous love triumphs over vol- 
untary morality ; the heart carries the day before 
the conscience. This is so in most women, who 
are commonly better examples of the natural 
power of both the moral and affectional faculties, 
and represent the natural tendency of human na- 
ture better than men. I think they seldom sacri- 
fice a person to an abstract rule of conduct ; or at 
least, if there is a collision between conscience 
and the heart, with them the heart carries the 
day. Non-resistants, having a rule of conduct 
which forbids them to hurt another, will yet do 



LOVE AXD THE AFFECTIONS. 



109 



this for a wife or child, though not for themselves, 
their love being greater than their selfishness. 
This is so common that it seems a rule of nature, 
— that the affectional instinct is a little stronger 

o 

than the moral instinct, and where both have re- 
ceived due culture, and there is still a collision 
between the two, that mercy is the law. But 
here no private love should prevail against right, 
but only universal love come in to its aid to sup- 
ply the defect of conscience. Brutus, so the story 
goes, finds his son committing a capital offence, 
and orders his head struck off, sacrificing his pri- 
vate and paternal love to his universal and human 
love of justice, his love of a special man to his 
love of what is right for all men. This is as it 
should be. 

Conscience may be cultivated in an exclusive 
manner to the neglect of the affections. Then 
conscience becomes despotic ; the man always be- 
comes hard and severe, a stern father, a cold 
neighbor, a harsh judge, a cruel magistrate. He 
will err often, but always on the side of ven- 
geance. Love improves the quality of finite mo- 
rality, for it is the same as divine justice. Abso- 
lute justice and absolute love are never antagonis- 
tic, but identical. 

The affections may be cultivated at the expense 
10 



110 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



of conscience. This often happens with such as 
limit the range of their love to a few friends, to 
their own family, class, or nation. The world is 
full of examples of this. Here is one who loves 
her own family with intense love, — her husband, 
children, grandchildren, and collateral relations, — 
the love always measured by propinquity to her. 
Like the crow in the fable, she thinks her own 
young the fairest of the fair, heedless of their vul- 
garity, and worldly and ignoble materialism. She 
is generous to them, no she-crow more bounteous to 
her young, but no hawk was ever more niggardly 
to all beyond. Here neglect of justice and scorn 
of conscience have corrupted her affections ; and 
her love is only self-love, — for she loves these but 
as limbs of herself, — and has degenerated into 
selfishness in a wider form, not simple, but many- 
headed selfishness. 

I once knew of a man who was a slave-trader 
on the Atlantic, and a proverb for cruelty among 
the felons of that class; he was rich, and remark- 
ably affectionate in his own family ; he studied the 
comfort of his daughters and wife, was self-deny- 
ing for their sake. Yet he did not hesitate to break 
up a thousand homes in Africa, that he might 
adorn his own in New England. The lion, the 
tiger, the hyena, each is kind to his whelps, — for 
instinctive love affects the beast also. No man 



LOVE AXD THE AFFECTIONS. 



Ill 



has universal love ; conscience gives the rale there- 
of, and so in applying justice applies God's uni- 
versal love to that special case. Seek to exercise 
love without justice, and you injure some one. 

The same form of affection appears on a larger 
scale in the members of a class in society, or a 
sect in religion ; it leads to kindliness within the 
circle of its range, but intense cruelty is often 
practised beyond that limit. All the aristocracies 
of the world, the little sects of Christendom, and 
the great sects of the human race, furnish exam- 
ples of this. 

What is called patriotism is another form of the 
same limited love, — a culture of the affections 
without regard to justice. Hence it has been 
held patriotic to build up your country to the ruin 
of another land, to love Jacob and hate Esau. 
This feeling is of continual occurrence. " Lands 
intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other/ 1 
cities that are rivals in trade seek to ruin each 
other ; nations do the same. 

In all these cases, where love is limited to the 
family, class, sect, or nation, the aim is this : Mu- 
tuality of love within the narrow circle ; without 
its range, mutuality of selfishness. Thus love is 
deemed only a privilege of convention and for a 
few, arbitrarily limited by caprice ; not a right, of 
nature and for all, the extension thereof to be lim- 



112 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



ited only by the power, not the will, of the man 
who loves. 

All the above are common forms of limited 
affection. The domestic, social, ecclesiastical, and 
political institutions of the world, the educational 
and commercial machinery of the world, tend to 
produce this result. All the religions of the world 
have practically fostered this mistake, by starting 
with the idea, that God loved best the men who 
worshipped Him in a certain conventional form. 

But this expansive and centrifugal power may 
be cultivated to the neglect of natural and well- 
proportioned self-love. This also is a defect, for 
the conservative or self-preserving power is quite as 
necessary as the beneficent and expansive power. 
Impenetrability is the necessary concomitant of 
attraction. The individual is first an integer, 
then a fraction of society ; he must keep his per- 
sonal integrity and discreteness of person, and not 
be lost in the press and crowd of other persons. 
What is true of bodies is not less so of spirits. 
Here is a man with so little self-love, that his per- 
sonality seems lost; he is no person, but now 
this man, now that, — a free port of trade, where 
all individualities are unloaded and protected ; but 
he has none. His circumference is everywhere ; 
his centre nowhere. He keeps other men's vine- 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIOxXS. 



113 



yards, not his own. This is a fault ; doubtless a 
rare one, still a fault which destroys the individual 
character of the man. 

There is, doubtless, a large difference amongst 
men in respect to the original power of the affec- 
tions, — a difference of nature ; a great difference in 
respect to the acquired power of love, a difference 
of culture ; a difference, also, in respect to the cul- 
ture of the heart, which may be developed jointly 
with mind and conscience, or independent of 
them, — a difference in proportion. Thus, practi- 
cally, the affectional power of men varies as much 
as the intellectual or the moral power. 

Look at the place which the affections occupy 
in the nature of man. In point of time they pre- 
cede the intellectual and moral powers in their 
order of development, they have a wider range in 
the world than those other faculties. You find 
affection in animals. In some, love is very power- 
ful. True, it appears there as rudimentary, and 
for a short time, as in birds, grouping them into 
brief cohesions. In some animals it is continual, 
yet not binding one individual to another in a 
perpetual combination, but grouping many iudi» 
viduals into a flock. The flock remains ; all the 
10* 



114 



LO YE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



individuals sustain a constant relation to the flock, 
but most unconstant relations to one another ; the 
male and female parting fellowship when the an- 
nual season of passion is over, the parents neglect- 
ing their child as soon as it outgrows the mothers 
care. Throughout the animal world love dees not 
appear to exist for its own sake, but only as a 
means to a material end ; now to create, then to 
protect the individual and the race. Besides, it is 
purely instinctive, not self-conscious and voluntary 
action. The animal seems not an agent, but only 
a tool of affection, his love necessitated, not spon- 
taneous. Accordingly, in its more permanent 
forms, love is merely gregarious, and does not 
come to individual sociality ; it seems but a more 
subtle mode of gravitation. A herd of buffaloes is 
only an aggregation of members, not a society of 
free individuals, who group from choice. Friend- 
ship, I think, never appears amongst animals, ex- 
cepting such as are under the eye of man, and 
have, in some manner not easily understood, ac- 
quired his habits. The animal does not appear to 
have private affinities, and to attach himself to this 
or that fellow-being with the discrimination of 
love ; development of the heart is never sought for 
as a thing good in itself, but only as a means to 
some other good. 
With man there is this greater gravitation of men 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



115 



into masses ; which, without doubt, is at first as in- 
stinctive as the grouping of bees or beavers ; but 
man is capable of modifying the action of this gre- 
garious instinct so, on the one side, as to form mi- 
nute cohesions of friendship, wherein each follows 
his private personal predilections, his own elective 
affinities ; and, also, on the other, to form vast as- 
sociations of men gravitating into a nation, ruled 
by a common will ; and one day we shall, no 
doubt, group all these nations into one great fam- 
ily of races, with a distinct self-consciousness of 
universal brotherhood. 

It is instructive to look on the rudimentary love 
in animals, and see the beginnings of human na- 
ture, as it were, so low down, and watch the suc- 
cessive risings in successive creations. It helps us 
to see the unity of the world, and also to foretell 
the development of human nature ; for what is 
there accomplished by successive creation of new 
races, with us takes place by the continual devel- 
opment of the same individual. 

It is according to the order of nature, that the 
power to love should be developed before the power 
to think. All things with us begin with a feeling ; 
next enlarge to an idea ; then take the form of ac- 
tion, the mind mediating between the inward sen- 
timent and the outward deed. We delight in love 
long before we have any conscious joy in truth or 



116 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



justice. In childhood we are acquainted with per- 
sons before we know things ; indeed, things are 
invested with a dim personality in the mind of 
children and of savages. We know father and 
mother long before we have any notion of justice 
or of truth. The spontaneous development of the 
heart in children is one of the most beautiful phe- 
nomena in nature. The child has self-love, but 
no selfishness ; his nebulous being not yet solidi- 
fied to the impenetrability which is to come. His 
first joys are animal, the next afFectional, the de- 
light of loving and of being loved ! 

Indeed, with most men the affections take the 
lead of all the spiritual powers ; only they act in a 
confined sphere of the family, class, sect, or nation. 
Men trust the heart more than the head. The 
mass of men have more confidence in a man of 
great affection than in one of great thought ; par- 
don is commonly popular, mercy better loved than 
severity. Men rejoice when the murderer is arrest- 
ed; but shout at his acquittal of the crime. The 
happiness of the greater part of men comes from 
affectional more than intellectual or moral sources. 
Hence the abundant interest felt in talk about per- 
sons, the popular fondness for personal anecdotes, 
biographies, ballads, love-stories, and the like. 
The mass of men love the person of their great 
man, not his opinions, and care more to see his 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS, 



117 



face and hear his voice than to know his ideas of 
truth and of justice. It is so with religious teach- 
ers. Men sympathize with the person before they 
take his doctrine. Hence the popular fondness for 
portraits of great men, for their autographs, and 
even for relics. The person of Jesus Christ has 
left a much greater impression on the hearts of 
men, than his doctrines have made on the mind 
and conscience of Christendom. For this reason, 
religious pictures preserve scenes which have noth- 
ing to do with the truth or the right that the man 
represented, but are merely personal details, often 
destitute of outward beauty, of no value to the 
mind, of much to the heart. This explains the 
popular fondness for stories and pictures of the 
sufferings of martyrs. A crucifix is nothing to the 
mind and conscience ; how much to the heart of 
Christendom! Hence, too, men love to conceive 
of God in the person of a man. 

Now and then you find a man of mere intellect- 
ual or moral power, who finds almost his whole 
delight in the exercise of his mind or conscience. 
Such men are rare and wonderful, but by no 
means admirable. 

Without the culture of the affections life is poor 
and unsatisfactory ; truth seems cold, and justice 
stern. Let a man have the piety of the body, of 
the mind and conscience, it is not satisfactory 



118 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



without the piety of the heart. Let him have 
this also, and what a world of delight it opens to 
him ! 

Take the whole population of Christendom, 
there are but one or two in a thousand who have 
much delight in intellectual pursuits, who find a 
deep and reconciling joy in science, or literature, 
or any art ; even music, the most popular of all, 
has a narrow range. But almost every one has a 
delight in the affections which quite transcends his 
intellectual joy. When a new book comes into 
being, if it be brave and good, it will quicken the 
progress of mankind ; men rejoice, and the human 
race folds to its bosom the works of Homer, Dante, 
Shakspeare, Milton, and will not willingly let them 
die. When a new child is born into some poor and 
half-starved family, it diminishes their "comforts,*' 
it/multiplies their toil, it divides their loaf, it crowds 
their bed and shares the unreplenished fire ; but 
with what joy is it welcomed there ! Men of great 
genius, who can judge the world by thought, feel 
less delight at the arrival of some great poet at his 
mind's estate, than many a poor mother feels at 
the birth of a new soul into the world ; far less 
than she feels in the rude affection of her home, 
naked, comfortless, and poor. I know there is a 
degradation caused by poverty, when the heart 
dies out of the man, and " the mother hath sodden 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



119 



her own child/' But such depravity is against 
nature, and only takes place when physical suffer- 
ing has worn off the human qualities, one by one, 
till only impenetrability is left. 

You find men that are ignorant, rich men too ; 
and they are not wholly ashamed of it. They 
say, " Early circumstances hindered my growth of 
mind, for I was poor. You may pity, but you 
should not blame me;' If you should accuse a 
man of lacking heart, of having no culture of af- 
fection, every one would feel it was a great re- 
proach, and, if true, a fault without excuse. No 
man ever confesses this, - — a sin against human 
nature. 

All men need something to poetize and idealize 
their life a little, something which they value for 
more than its use, and which is a symbol of their 
emancipation from the mere materialism and 
drudgery of daily life. Rich men attempt to do 
this with beautiful houses, with costly furniture, 
with sumptuous food, and " wine too good for the 
tables of pontiffs," thereby often only thickening 
and gilding the chain which binds the soul to 
earth. Some men idealize their life a little with 
books, music, flowers ; with science, poetry, and 
art ; with thought. But such men are compara- 
tively rare, even in Scotland and New England, — 



120 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIOXS. 



two or three in the hundred, not more. In Amer- 
ica the cheap newspaper is the most common in- 
strument used for this purpose, a thing not without 
its value. But the majority of men do this ideal- 
izing by the affections, which furnish the chief 
poetry of their life, — the wife and husband de- 
lighting in one another, both in their children. 
Burns did not exaggerate in his Cotter's Saturday 
Night, when he painted the laborer's joy : 

" His wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily, 

His clean hearth-stane. his thriftie wifie's smile, 
The lisping infant prattling on his knee, 
Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, 
An' makes him quite forget his labor an' his toil." 

I have heard a boorish pedant wonder how a 
woman could spend so many years of her life with 
little children, and be content! In her satisfaction 
he found a proof of her inferiority, and thought 
her but the " servant of a wooden cradle,' 7 herself 
almost as wooden. But in that gentle companion- 
ship she nursed herself and fed a higher faculty 
than our poor pedant, with his sophomoric wit, 
had yet brought to consciousness, and out of her 
wooden cradle got more than he had learned to 
know. A physician once, with unprofessional im- 
piety, complained that we are not born men, but 
babies. He did not see the value of infancy as a 
delight to the mature, and for the education of the 



LOVE 



AND THE 



AFFECTIONS. 



121 



heart. At one period of life we need objects of 
instinctive passion, at another, of instinctive be- 
nevolence without passion. 

I am not going to undervalue the charm of wis- 
dom, nor the majestic joy which comes from loving 
principles of right ; but if I could have only one 
of them, give me the joy of the affections, — my 
delight in others, theirs in me, — the joy of delight- 
ing, rather than the delight of enjoying. Here 
is a woman with large intellect, and attainments 
which match her native powers, but with a genius 
for love, developed in its domestic, social, patri- 
otic, human form, with a wealth of affection which 
surpasses even her affluence of intellect. Her chief 
delight is to bless the men who need her blessing. 
Naturalists carry mind into matter, and seek the 
eternal truth of God in the perishing forms of the 
fossil plant, or the evanescent tides of the sea ; she 
carries love into the lanes and kennels of society, 
to give bread to the needy, eyes to the blind, mind 
to the ignorant, and a soul to men floating and 
weltering in this sad pit of society. I do not un- 
dervalue intellect in any of its nobler forms, but if 
God gave me my choice to have either the vast 
intellect of a Newton, an Aristotle, a Shakspeare, 
a Homer, the ethical insight of the great legisla- 
tors, the moral sense of Moses, or Menu, the con- 
science of men who discover justice and organize 
11 



122 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



unalienable right into human institutions, — or else 
to take the heroic heart which so loves mankind, 
and I were to choose what brought its possessor 
the greatest joy, — I would surely take, not the 
great head, but the great heart, the power of love 
before the power of thought. 

I know we often envy the sons of genius, men 
with tall heads and brain preternaturally delicate 
and nice, thinking God partial. They are not to 
be envied : the top of Mount Washington is very 
lofty; it far transcends the neighboring hills, and 
overlooks the mountain-tops from the Mississippi 
to the Atlantic main, and has no fellow from the 
Northern Sea down to the Mexique Bay. Men 
look up and wonder at its tall height ; but it must 
take the rude blasts of every winter upon its naked, 
granite head ; its sides are furrowed with the storm. 
It is of unequalled loftiness, but freezing cold ; 
while in the low valleys and on the mountain's 
southern slopes the snow melts quick away, early 
the grass comes green, the flowers lift up their 
modest, lovely face, and shed their fragrance on 
the sudden spring. Who shall tell me that intel- 
lectual or moral grandeur is higher in the scale 
of powers than the heart ! It is not so. Mind 
and conscience are great and noble ; truth and 
justice are exceeding dear, but love is dearer than 
both. 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 123 



See the array of natural means provided for the 
development and education of the heart. Spiritual 
love, joining with the instinctive passion which 
peoples the world, attracts mankind into little 
binary groups, families of two. Therein we are 
all born of love. Love watches over our birth. 
Our earliest knowledge of mankind is of one ani- 
mated by the instinctive power of affection, devel- 
oped into conscious love. The first human feeling 
extended towards us is a mother's love. Even 
the rude woman in savage Patagonia turns her 
sunniest aspect to her child ; the father does the 
same. In our earliest years we are almost wholly 
in the hands of women, in whom the heart em- 
phatically prevails over the head. They attract 
and win, while man only invades and conquers. 
The first human force we meet is woman's love. 
All this tends to waken and unfold the affections, 
to give them their culture, and hasten their growth. 
The other children of kindred blood, asking or giv- 
ing kind offices ; affectionate relations and friends, 
who turn out the fairest side of nature and them- 
selves to the new-born stranger, — all of these are 
helps in the education of the heart. All men un- 
consciously put on amiable faces in the presence 
of children, thinking it is not good to cause these 
little ones to offend. As the roughest of men will 
gather flowers for little children, so in their pres- 



124 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



ence he turns out "the silver lining" of his cloudy 
character to the young immortals, and would not 
have them know the darker part. The sourest 
man is not wholly hopeless when he will not blas- 
pheme before his son. 

The child's affection gets developed on the 
smallest scale at first. The mother's love tempts 
forth the son's ; he loves the bosom that feeds him, 
the lips that caress, the person that loves. Soon 
the circle widens, and includes brothers and sisters, 
and familiar friends ; then gradually enlarges more 
and more, the affections strengthening as their 
empire spreads. So love travels from person to 
person, from the mother or nurse to the family at 
home ; then to the relatives and frequent guests ; 
next to the children at school, to the neighborhood, 
the town, the state, the nation; and at last manly 
love takes in the whole family of mankind, count- 
ing nothing alien that is human. 

You often find men lamenting the lack of early 
education of the intellect ; it is a grievous de- 
ficiency ; and it takes the hardest toil in after years 
to supply the void, if indeed it can ever be done. 
It is a misfortune to fail of finding an opportunity 
for the culture of conscience in childhood, and to 
acquire bad habits in youth, which at great cost 
you must revolutionize at a later day. But it is a 
yet greater loss to miss the opportunity of affec- 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



125 



tional growth ; a sad thing to be bom, and yet 
not into a happy home, — to lack the caresses, the 
fondness, the self-denying love, which the child's 
nature needs so much to take, and the mother's 
needs so much to give. The cheeks which affec- 
tion does not pinch, which no mother kisses, have 
always a sad look, that nothing can conceal, and 
in childhood get a scar which they will carry all 
their days. What sad faces one always sees in 
the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neg- 
lect the heart than the head. 

In a world like this, not much advanced as yet 
in any high qualities of spirit, but still advan- 
cing, it is beautiful to see the examples of love 
which we sometimes meet, the exceptional cases 
which to me are prophecies of that good time 
which is so long in coming. I will not speak of 
the love of husband and wife, or of parent and 
child, for each of these is mainly controlled by a 
srong generic instinct, which deprives the feeling 
of its personal and spontaneous character. I will 
speak of spontaneous love not connected with the 
connubial or parental instincts. You see it in the 
form of friendship, charity, patriotism, and phi- 
lanthropy, where there is no tie of kindred blood, 
no impulsion of instincts to excite, but only a kin- 
dred heart and an attractive soul. Men tell us. 
11 * 



126 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



that the friendship of the ancients has passed 
away. But it is not so ; Damon and Pythias are 
perpetually reproduced in every walk of life, save 
that where luxury unnerves the man, or avarice 
coins him into a copper cent, or ambition degrades 
him to lust of fame and power. Every village has 
its tale of this character. The rude life of the 
borderers on the frontiers of civilization, the expe- 
rience of men in navigation, in all the difficult 
emergencies of life, bring out this heroic affection 
of the heart. 

What examples do we all know of friendship 
and of charity ! Here is a woman of large intel- 
lect, well disciplined, well stored, gifted with mind 
and graced with its specific piety, whose chief de- 
light it is to do kind deeds to those beloved. Her 
life is poured out, like the fair light of heaven, 
around the bedside of the sick. She comes like 
a last sacrament to the dying man, bringing back 
a reminiscence of the best things of mortal life, 
and giving a foretasted prophecy of the joys of 
heaven, her very presence an alabaster box of oint- 
ment, exceeding precious, filling the house with 
the balm of its thousand flowers. Her love adorns 
the paths wherein she teaches youthful feet to tread, 
and blooms in amaranthine loveliness above the 
head laid low in earth. She would feel insulted 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



127 



by gratitude ; God can give no greater joy to mor- 
tal men than the consciousness whence such a life 
wells out. Not content with blessing the few 
whom friendship joins to her, her love enlarges 
and runs over the side of the private cup, and fills 
the bowl of many a needy and forsaken one. Self- 
denial is spontaneous, — self-indulgence of the 
noble heart to her. In the presence of such affec- 
tion as this, the intellect of a Plato would be 
abashed, and the moral sense of a saint would 
shrink and say to itself: " Stand back, my soul, for 
here is somewhat far holier than thou!" In sight 
of such excellence I am ashamed of intellect; I 
would not look upon the greatest mind that ever 
spoke to ages yet unborn. 

There is far more of this charity than most men 
imagine. You find it amid the intense worldliness 
of this city, where upstart Mammon scoffs at God; 
in the hovels of the poor, in the common dwellings 
of ordinary men, even in the houses of the rich; 
drive out Nature with a dollar, still she comes 
back. This love is the feminine saviour of man- 
kind, and gives a peace which this world cannot 
give nor take away. From its nature this plant 
grows in by-places, where it is not seen by ordi- 
nary eyes, till w'ounded you flee thither ; then it 
heals your smart, or when beheld fills you with 
wonder at its human loveliness. 



128 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



The calling of a clergyman in a great, wicked 
town brings him acquainted with ghastly forms of 
human wickedness, — with felons of conscience, 
and men idiotic in their affections, who seem born 
with an arithmetic for a conscience, and an eagle 
for a heart; but we also find those angels of affec- 
tion in whom the dearest attribute of God becomes 
incarnate, and his love made flesh ; else an earnest 
minister might wear a face grim, stony, and bat- 
tered all over by the sad sight of private suffering, 
and the sadder sight of conscious and triumphant 
wickedness trampling the needy down to dust, and 
treating the Almighty with sneer and scoff. 

Men tell us of but few examples of patriotism ; 
they are common. Let us see examples in its 
vulgarest, and so most honored form, — love of 
country, to the exclusion and hate of other lands. 
Men tell of Regulus, how he laid down his life 
for his country, the brave old heathen that he was. 
But in the wickedest of modern wars, when 
America plundered Mexico of soil and men, many 
a deluded volunteer laid down his life, I doubt 
not, with a heroism as pure, and a patriotism as 
strong, as that of Regulus or Washington. De- 
testing the unholy war, let us honor the virtue 
which it brought to light. 

This virtue of patriotism is common with the 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



129 



mass of men in this republic. In aristocratic gov- 
ernments the rich men and nobles have it in a 
large degree ; it is, however, somewhat selfish, — a 
love of their private privileges more than of the 
general rights of their countrymen. With us in 
America, especially in the seat of riches and of 
trade, there seems little patriotism in the wealthy, 
or more educated class of men ; small fondness 
for the commonwealth in that quarter. Exclusive 
love of gain drives that out of their heart. To 
the dollar, all lands, all governments, are the same. 

But apart from patriotism, charity, friendship, I 
have seen most noble examples of the same affec- 
tion on a yet wider scale, — I mean philanthropy, 
the love of all mankind. You all know men, whose 
affection, at first beginning at home, and loving 
only the mother who gave her baby nature's bread, 
has now transcended family and kin, gone beyond 
all private friendships with like-minded men, over- 
leaped the far barriers of our native land, and now, 
loving family, friend, and country, loves too all 
humankind. This is the largest expanse of affec- 
tion ; the man's heart, once filled with love for one, 
for a few, for men in need beneath his eye, for his 
countrymen, has now grown bountiful to all. To 
love the lovely, to sympathize with the like- 
minded, — every body can do that ; — all save an 



130 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



ill-born few, whom we may pity, but must not 
blame, for their congenital deformity and dwarf- 
ishness ; — but to love the unlovely, to sympathize 
with the contrary-minded, to give to the uncharita- 
ble, to forgive such as never pity, to be just to men 
who make iniquity a law, to pay their sleepless 
hate with never-ceasing love, — that is the triumph 
of the affections, the heroic degree of love; you 
must be but little lower than the angels to do that. 
It is one of the noblest attainments of man, and 
in this he becomes most like God. The intellect 
acquaints you with truth, the thought of God ; 
conscience informs you with his justice, the moral 
will of God ; the heart fitly exercised gives you a 
fellowship with his eternal love, the most intimate 
feeling of the Infinite Father ; having that, you can 
love men spite of the imperfections of their con- 
duct and character, — can love the idiot, the crimi- 
nal, hated or popular, — be towardly to the fro- 
ward, kind to the unmerciful, and on them bestow 
the rain and the sunshine of your benevolence, your 
bounty limited only by your power, not your will, 
to bless, asking no gratitude, expecting no return. 

I do not look for this large philanthropy in all 
men here, only in a few. All have a talent for lov- 
ing, though this is as variously distributed as any 
intellectual gift ; few have a genius for benevolence. 
The sublime of patriotism, the holy charity, and 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS, 



131 



the delicate friendship, are more common. The 
narrower love between husband and wife, child and 
parent, has instinct to aid it, and is so common, 
that, like daily bread and nightly sleep, we forget 
to be thankful for it, not heeding how much de- 
pends thereon. 

The joys of affection are the commonest of 
joys; sometimes the sole poetic ornament in the 
hutch of the poor, they are also the best things in 
the rich man's palace. They are the Shekinah, 
the presence of God in the dwellings of men. It 
is through the affections that most men learn 
religion. I know men often say, " Fear first 
taught us God." No ! Fear first taught us a 
devil, — often worshipped as the God, — -and with 
that fear all devils fade away, they and their mis- 
anthropic hell. Ghosts cannot stand the light, 
nor devils love. My affections bind me to God, 
and as the heart grows strong my ever-deepening 
consciousness of God grows more and more, till 
God's love occupies the heart, and the sentiment 
of God is mine. 

Notwithstanding the high place which the affec- 
tions hold in the natural economy of man, and 
the abundant opportunities for their culture and 
development furnished by the very constitution of 



132 LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 

the family, but little Value is placed thereon in 
what is called the " superior education " of man- 
kind. The class of men that lead the Christian 
world have but a small development of affection. 
Patriotism is the only form of voluntary love 
which it is popular with such men to praise, — that 
only for its pecuniary value ; charity seems thought 
a weakness, to be praised only on Sundays ;. ava- 
rice is the better week-day virtue; friendship is 
deemed too romantic for a trading town. Philan- 
thropy is mocked at by statesmen and leading 
capitalists ; it is the standing butt of the editor, 
whereat he shoots his shaft, making up in its barb 
and venom for his arrows' lack of length and 
point. Metropolitan clergymen rejoice in calum- 
niating philanthropy ; " Even the golden rule hath 
its exceptions," say they. It is deemed important 
to show that Jesus of Nazareth was no philan- 
thropist, and cared nothing for the sin of the pow- 
erful, which trod men into a mire of blood. In 
what is called the " highest education," only the 
understanding and the taste get a considerable 
culture. The piety of the heart is thought inele- 
gant in society, unscholarly with the learned, and 
a dreadful heresy in the churches. In literature 
it is not love that wins the palm ; it is power to 
rule by force, — force of muscles or force of mind : 
" None but the brave deserve the fair." In pop- 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS 



133 



ular speech it is the great 4 fighters that men glo- 
rify, not the great lovers of mankind. Interest eats 
out the heart from commerce and politics ; con- 
trolling men have no faith in disinterested benevo- 
lence ; to them the nation is a monstrous shop, 
a trading city but a bar-room in a commercial 
tavern, the church a desk for the accountant, the 
world a market ; men are buyers and sellers, em- 
ployers and employed. Governments are mainly 
without love, often without justice. This seems 
their function : To protect capital and tax toil. 

Hitherto justice has not been done to the affec- 
tions in religion. We have been taught to fear 
God, not to love Him, to see Him in the earth- 
quake and the storm, in the deluge, or the " ten 
plagues of Egypt," in the " black death," or the 
cholera ; not to see God in the morning sun, or in 
the evening full of radiant gentleness. Love has 
little to do with the popular religion of our time. 
God is painted as a dreadful Eye, which bores 
through the darkness to spy out the faults of men 
who sneak and skulk about the world; or as a 
naked, bony Arm, uplifted to crush his children 
down with horrid squelch to endless hell. The 
long line of scoffers from Lucian, their great hie- 
rophant, down to Voltaire and his living coadju- 
tors, have not shamed the priesthood from such 
revolting images of deity. Sterner men, who saw 
12 



134 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



the loveliness of the dear God and set it forth in 
holy speech and holy life, — to meet a fate on 
earth far harder than the scoffer's doom, — they 
cannot yet teach men that love of God casts every 
fear away. In the Catholic mythology the Virgin 
Mary, its most original creation, represents pure 
love, — she, and she alone. Hence is she the pop- 
ular object of worship in all Catholic countries. 
But the popular Protestant sects have the Roman 
Godhead after Mary is taken away. 

When this is so in religion, do you wonder at 
the lack of love in law and custom, in politics 
and trade? Shall we write satires on mankind? 
Rather let us make its apology. Man is a baby 
yet ; the time for the development of conscious 
love has not arrived. Let us not say, " No man 
eat fruit of thee hereafter " ; let us wait ; dig about 
the human tree and encourage it ; in time it shall 
put forth figs. 

Still affection holds this high place in the nature 
of man. Out of our innermost hearts there comes 
the prophecy of a time when it shall have a kin- 
dred place in history and the affairs of men. In 
the progress of mankind, love takes continually a 
higher place ; what was adequate and well-pro- 
portioned affection a century ago, is not so now. 
Long since, prophets rose up to declare the time 
was coming when all hate should cease, there 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



135 



should be war no more, and the sword should be 
beaten into the ploughshare. Were they dream- 
ers of idle dreams? It was human nature which 
spoke through them its lofty prophecy ; and man- 
kind fulfils the highest prediction of every noble 
man. The fighter is only the hod-carrier of the 
philanthropist. Soldiers build the scaffolding ; 
with the voice of the trumpet, with the thunder 
of the captain, and manifold shouting, are the 
stones drawn to the spot, but it is a temple of 
peace which gets builded at the last. 

In every man who lives a true life the affections 
grow continually. He began with his mother and 
his nurse, and journeyed ever on, pitching his 
tent each night a day's march nearer God. His 
own children helped him love others yet more ; 
his children's children carried the old man's heart 
quite out beyond the bounds of kin and country, 
and taught him to love mankind. He grows old 
in learning to love, and now, when age sets the 
silver diadem upon his brow, not only is his love 
of truth and justice greater than before, — not only 
does he love his wife better than in his hour of 
prime, when manly instinct added passion to his 
heart, — not only does he love his children more 
than in their infancy, when the fatherly instinct 
first began its work, — not only has he more spon- 
taneous love for his grandchildren than he felt for 



136 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



his first new-born babe, — but his mature affection 
travels beyond his wife, and child, and children's 
child, to the whole family of men, mourns in 
their grief, and joys in their delight. All his 
powers have been greatened in his long, industri- 
ous, and normal life, and so his power of love has 
continually enlarged. The human objects do not 
wholly satisfy his heart's desire. The ideal of love 
is nowhere actual in the world of men, no finite 
person fills up the hungry heart, so he turns to the 
Infinite Object of affection, his heart turns to the 
affection of the great Mother of mankind ; and in 
the sentiment of love he and his God are one. 
God's thought in his mind, God's justice in his 
conscience, God's love in his heart, — why should 
not he be blessed ? 

In mankind, as in a faithful man, there has 
been the same enhancement of the power to love. 
Affection begins to legislate, even to administer 
the laws of love. Long ago you see intimation of 
this in the institutes of Moses and Menu. " The 
qualitative precedes the quantitative," as twilight 
precedes day. Slowly vengeance fades out of 
human institutions, slowly love steals in; — the 
wounded soldier must be healed, and paid, his 
widow fed, and children comforted; the slaves 
must be set free; the yoke of kings and nobles 
must be made lighter, be broken, and thrown 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



137 



away ; all men must have their rights made sure ; 
the poor must be fed, must have his human right 
to a vote, to justice, truth, and love; the ignorant 
must be educated, the state looking to it that no 
one straggles in the rear and so is lost ; the crim- 
inals — I mean the little criminals committing 
petty crimes — must be instructed, healed, and 
manlified ; the lunatic must be restored to his in- 
tellect ; the blind, the deaf and dumb, the idiots, 
must be taught, and all mankind be blessed. The 
attempt to banish war out of the world, odium 
from theology, capital punishment out of the state, 
the Devil and his hell from the Christian mythol- 
ogy, — the effort to expunge hate from the popular 
notion of God, and fear from our religious con- 
sciousness, — all this shows the growth of love 
in the spirit of men. A few men see that while 
irreligion is fear of a devil, religion is love : one 
half is piety, — the love of God as truth, justice, 
love, as Infinite Deity ; the rest is morality, — self- 
love, and the love of man, a service of God by the 
normal use, development, and enjoyment of every 
faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, every 
particle of power we possess over man or over 
matter. A few men see that God is love, and 
made the world of love as substance, from love 
as motive, and for love as end. 

Human nature demands the triumph of pure, 
12* 



138 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



disinterested love at last; the nature of God is 
warrant that what is promised in man's nature 
shall be fulfilled in his development. Human na- 
ture is human destiny ; God's nature, universal 
Providence. The mind tells us of truth which 
will prevail; conscience, of justice sure to conquer; 
the heart gives us the prophecy of infinite love 
certain to triumph. One day there shall be no 
fear before men, no fear before God, no tyrant in 
society, no Devil in theology, no hell in the my- 
thology of men ; love and the God of love shall 
take their place. Hitherto Jesus is an exceptional 
man, the man of love ; Csesars and Alexanders 
are instantial men, men of force and fight. One 
day this will be inverted, these conquerors swept 
off and banished, the philanthropists become com- 
mon, the kingdom of hate forgotten in the com- 
monwealth of love. Here is work for you and 
me to do ; for our afFectional piety, assuming its 
domestic, social, national, universal form, will 
bless us with its delight, and then go forth to bless 
mankind; and long after you and I shall have 
gone home to the God we trust, our afFectional 
piety shall be a sentiment living in the hearts of 
men ; — yes, a power in the world to bless man- 
kind for ever and ever. 

" Serene will be our days and bright, 
And happy will our nature be, 



LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS. 



139 



"When love is an unerring light, 

And joy its own security. 

And they a blissful course may hold 

Even now, who, not unwisely bold, 

Live in the spirit of this creed. 

Yet find that other strength, according to their need/' 



V. 



OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



WORSHIP THE LORD IX THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. — Ps. Xxix. 2. 

The mind converses with things indirectly, by 
means of the senses; with ideas directly, indepen- 
dent of the senses, by spiritual intuition, whereto 
the senses furnish only the occasion, not the power, 
of knowledge ; so the mind arrives at truth, in 
various forms or modes, rests contented therein, 
and has joy in the love thereof. Conscience is 
busied with rules of right, by direct intuition 
learns the moral law of the universe as it is writ 
in human nature, — outward experience furnish- 
ing only the occasion, not the power, of knowing 
right, — arrives at justice, rests contented therein, 
and has its joy in the love thereof. The affec- 
tions deal with persons, whom it is their function 
to love, travel ever on to wider and wider spheres, 
joying in the men they love, but always seeking 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



141 



the perfect object with which they may be con- 
tented and have the absolute joy of the heart. 
To think truth, to will justice, to feel love, is the 
highest act respectively of the intellectual, moral, 
and affectional powers of man, which seek the 
absolutely true, just, and lovely, as the object of 
their natural desire. 

The soul has its own functions. God is the 
object of the soul. As the mind and conscience 
by their normal activity bring truth and justice to 
human consciousness, so the soul makes us con- 
scious of God. 

"We see what intellectual, moral, and affectional 
creations have come from the action of the mind, 
the conscience, and the heart of man ; we see the 
human use thereof and joy therein. But the re- 
ligious faculty has been as creative and yet more 
powerful, overmastering all the other powers of 
man. The profoundest study of man's affairs, or 
the hastiest glance thereat, shows the power of the 
soul for good and ill. The phenomena of man's 
religious history are as varied and important as 
they are striking. The surface of the world is 
dotted all over with the temples which man has 
built in his acts of reverence ; religious sentiments 
and ideas are deeply ploughed into the history of 
every tribe that has occupied time or peopled 
space, Consider mankind as one man, immortal 



142 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



and not growing old, universal history as his biog- 
raphy; study the formation of his religious con- 
sciousness, the gradual growth of piety in all its 
forms, normal or monstrous ; note his stumblings 
in the right way, his wanderings in the wrong, his 
penitence, his alarm and anxiety, his remorse for 
sin, his successive attainments of new truth, new 
justice, and new love, the forms in which he 
expresses his inward experience, — and what a 
strange, attractive spectacle this panorama of man's 
religious history presents to the thoughtful man. 

The religious action of a child begins early ; 
but like all early activity it is unconscious. We 
cannot remember that ; we can only recollect what 
we have known in the form of consciousness, or, 
at best, can only dimly remember what lay dimly 
and half conscious in us, though the effects thereof 
may be as lasting as our mortal life. You see the 
tendency to the superhuman in quite little chil- 
dren asking, " But who made God?" the child's 
causality heedlessly leaping at the Infinite, he 
having a dim sentiment of the Maker of all that 
is itself unmade. You have seen little babies, 
early deprived of their mother, involuntarily and 
by instinct feeling with their mouths after what 
nature provided for their nourishment. So in our 
childhood as involuntarily and instinctively do we 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



143 



feel with our soul after the Infinite God, often, 
alas ! to be beguiled by our nurses with some sop 
of a deity which fills our mouth for the time and 
keeps us from perishing. Perhaps a few of you 
remember a time when you had a sentiment — it 
was more a feeling than a thought — of a vague, 
dim, mysterious somew T hat, which lay at the bot- 
tom of all things, was above all, about all, and in 
all, which you could not comprehend nor yet 
escape from. You seemed a part of it, or it of 
you ; you wondered that you could not see with 
your eyes, nor hear with your ears, nor touch with 
your hands, what you yet felt and longed after 
with such perplexity of indistinctness. Some- 
times you loved it ; sometimes you feared. You 
dared not name it, or if you did, no one word was 
name enough for so changeable a thing. Now 
you felt it in the sunshine, then in the storm ; now 
it gave life, then it took life away. You con- 
nected it with all that was strange and uncom- 
mon ; now it was a great loveliness, then an ugli- 
ness of indefinite deformity. In a new place you 
missed it at first ; but it soon came back, travelling 
w T ith the child, a constant companion at length. 

All men do not remember this, I think ; only a 
few, in whom religious consciousness began early. 
But we have all of us been through this nebulous 
period of religious history, when the soul had 



144 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



emotions for which the mind could not frame 
adequate ideas. 

You see the same phenomena drawn on a 
large scale in the history of ancient nations, 
whose monuments still attest these facts of con- 
sciousness ; you find nations at this day still in 
this nebulous period of religion. Sphinxes and 
pyramids are fossil remains of old facts of con- 
sciousness, which you and I and every man have 
reproduced. Savages are baby-nations, feeling 
after God, and trying to express with their reflec- 
tive intellect the immediate emotions of the soul. 
When language is a clumsy instrument, men try 
to carve in stone what they fail to express in 
speech. Is the soul directly conscious of a super- 
human power ? they seek to legitimate the feeling 
in the mind, and so translate it to a thought. 
This vague, mysterious, superhuman something, 
before it is solidified into deity, let me call The 
Divine. Man does not know what it is. " It is 
not myself," says he. " What is it then ? Some 
outward thing ? " He takes the outward thing 
which seems most wondrous to himself, — a rep- 
tile, beast, bird, insect; an element, the wind, the 
lightning, the sun, the moon, a planet, or a star. 
Outward things embody his inward feeling; but 
while there are so many elements of confusion 
within him, no one embodiment is enough ; he 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 145 

must have many, each one a step beyond the other. 
His feeling becomes profounder, his thought more 
clear. At length he finds that man is more mighty 
than the elements, and seeks to consolidate the 
Divine in man, and has personifications thereof, 
instead of his primitive embodiments in nature. 
Then his feeling of the Divine becomes an idea of 
Deity; he has his personal gods, with all the acci- 
dents of human personality, — the passions, feel- 
ings, thoughts, mistakes, and all the frailties of 
mortal men. 

Age after age this work goes on ; the human 
idea of God has its metempsychosis, and transmi- 
grates through many a form, rising higher at every 
step until this day. In studying mathematics man 
has used for counters the material things of earth, 
calculated by the help of pebbles from the beach, 
learned the decimal system from his ten fingers, 
and wonders of abstract science from the compli- 
cated diagrams of the sky. So man has used rep- 
tiles, beasts, and all the elements and orbs of na- 
ture, in studying his sentiment of God, transfer- 
ring each excellence of nature to the Divine, and 
then each excellence of man. Nature is the rosary 
of man's prayer. The successive embodiments 
and personifications of God in matter, animals^ 
or men were in religion what the hypotheses of 
Thales and Ptolemy, Galileo and Kepler, were in 

13 



146 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



science, — helps to attain a more general form of 
truth. Every idol-fetish, every embodiment of a 
conception of God in matter, every personification 
thereof in man, has been a step forward in relig- 
ious progress. The grossest fetichism is only the 
early shoot from the instinctive seed, one day to 
blossom into the idea of the Infinite God. The 
confusion of past and present mythologies is not 
only a witness to the confusion in the religious 
consciousness of men, but the outward expression 
helps men to understand the inward fact, and so 
to bring truth out of error. 

The religious history of mankind could not have 
been much different from what it has been ; the 
margin for human caprice is not a very wide one. 
All mankind had the same process to pass through. 
The instinct of development in the human race 
is immensely strong, even irrepressible ; checked 
here, it puts out a limb in another place. The life 
of mankind is continual growth. There is a spe- 
cial progress of the intellectual, moral, affectional, 
and religious faculties of man ; so a general pro- 
gress of man; with that, a progress in the ideas 
which men form of God. Each step seems to us 
unavoidable and not to be dispensed with. Once 
unconscious reverence of the Divine was all man 
had attained to ; next he reached the worship of 
the Deity in the form of material or animal nature, 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 147 

then personified in man. Let us not libel the 
human race : we are babies before we are men. 
" Live and learn " applies to mankind, as to Jo- 
seph and Jane. 

You and I are born as far from pure religion as 
the first men, and have passed over the same 
ground which the human race has painfully trod, 
only mankind has been before us, and made a 
road to travel on ; so we journey more swiftly ; 
and in twenty or thirty years an ordinary man 
accomplishes what it took the human race five or 
six hundred generations to achieve. But hitherto 
the majority of Christians have not attained unity, 
or even concord, in their conception of the Deity. 
There is a God, a Christ, a Holy Ghost, and a Devil, 
with angels and saints, demons and damned ; it 
takes all these to represent the popular ecclesias- 
tical conception of the Deity ; and a most hetero- 
geneous mixture of contradictions and impossibili- 
ties do they make. The Devil is part of the pop- 
ular Godhead. Here and there is a man conscious 
of God as Infinite ; but such are only exceptional 
men, and accordingly disowned as heretics, con- 
demned, bat no longer burnt, as of old time. 

It is plain that the religious faculty is the strong- 
est spiritual power in the constitution of man. Ac- 



148 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



cordingly, what is called religion is always one of 
the mightiest forces in the world of men. It over- 
rides the body, mutilates every instinct, and hews 
off every limb ; it masters the intellect, the con- 
science, and the affections. Lightning shows us 
the power of electricity, shattering that it may 
reach its end, and shattering what it reaches ; the 
power of religion hitherto has been chiefly shown 
in this violent exhibition. A crusade is only a 
long thunder-storm of the religious forces. 

In the greater part of the world, men who speak 
in the name of God are looked on with more 
reverence than any other. So every tyrant seeks 
to get the priesthood on his side. Hard Napoleon 
got the Pope to assist at the imperial coronation ; 
even the cannons must yield to the Cross. All 
modern wickedness must be banked up with Chris- 
tianity. If the State of the Philistines wishes to 
sow some eminently wicked seed, it ploughs with 
the heifer of the Church. A nation always pre- 
pares itself for its great works with consecration 
and prayer ; both the English and American revo- 
lutions are examples of this. The religious senti- 
ment lies exceeding deep in the heart of mankind. 
Even to-day the nations look on men that die for 
their country as a sacrifice offered to God. No 
government is so lasting as that based on religious 
sentiments and ideas; with the mass of men the 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 149 



State is part of the Church, and politics a national 
sacrament. Nothing so holds a nation together as 
unity of religious conviction. Men love to think 
their rulers have a religious sanction. " Kings 
rule by divine right," says the monarchist ; " Civil 
government is of God," quoth the Puritan. The 
mass of men love to spread acts of religion along 
their daily life, having the morning sacrament for 
birth, the evening sacrament for death, and the 
noonday sacrament of marriage for the mature 
beauty of maid and man. Thus in all the sects, 
the morning, the evening, and the noon of life are 
connected with sentiments and ideas of religion. 
In New England we open a town-meeting, a ban- 
quet, or a court with prayer to God. 

You see the strength of the religious instinct in 
the power of the sacred class, which has existed in 
all nations, while passing from the savage state 
to the highest civilization, — a power which only 
passes away when the class which bears the name 
ceases to represent the religious feeling and thought 
of the nation, and merely keeps the traditions and 
ceremonies of old time. So long as the priests 
represent God to the people, they are the strongest 
class. What are the armies of Saul, if Samuel 
pleases to anoint a shepherd-lad for king? You 
see examples of this power of the sacred class in 
Egypt, in India, in Judea, in Greece and Rome, 

13* 



150 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

before the philosopher outgrew the priest. You 
see it in Europe during the Middle Ages ; what 
monuments thereof are left, marking all the land 
from Byzantium to Upsala with convents, basili- 
cas, minster, cathedral, dome, and spire ! At this 
day the Mormons, on the borders of American 
civilization, gather together the rudest white men 
of the land, and revive the ancient priestly power 
of darker times, a hierarchic despotism under a re- 
public. In such communities the ablest men and 
the most ambitious form a sacred class ; the Church 
offers the fairest field for activity. There religion is 
obviously the most powerful form of power. Men 
who live in a city where the tavern is taller, cost- 
lier, more beautiful and permanent, than the tem- 
ple, and the tavern-keeper thought a more im- 
portant man than the minister of religion, who is 
only a temple-keeper now, can hardly understand 
the period when such works as the Cathedral at 
Milan or the Duomo at Venice got built : but a 
Mormon city reveals the same state of things ; 
Nauvoo and Deseret explain Jerusalem and Car- 
nak. 

The religious faculty has overmastered all others; 
the mind is reckoned " profane " in comparison. 
Does the priest tell men in its name to accept 
what contradicts the evidence of the senses, and all 
human experience, millions bow down before the 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 151 

Grand Lama or the Pope. It is the faith of the 
Christian world, that a Galilean woman bore the 
Almighty God in her bosom, and nursed Him at her 
breast. Augustine and Aquinas stooped their proud 
intellects and accepted the absurdity. The priests 
have told the people that three persons are one 
God, or three Gods one person, — that the world 
was created in six days ; the people give up their 
intellect and try to believe the assertion, Grotius 
and Leibnitz assenting to the tale. Every thing 
written in the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mor- 
mon, is thus made to pass current with their respec- 
tive worshippers. In the name of religion men sac- 
rifice reason. Says St. James. " Is any sick among 
you? let him call for the elders of the Church ; and 
let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in 
the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith 
shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up." 
Thousands of men, in the name of religion, believe 
that this medical advice of a Hebrew fisherman 
was given by the infallible inspiration of God; 
and it is clerically thought wicked and blasphe- 
mous to speak of it as I do this day. I only men- 
tion these facts to show the natural strength of 
the religious instinct, working in a perverted and 
unnatural form, and against the natural action of 
the mind. 

In like manner religion is made to silence the 



152 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



moral faculties. The Hebrews will kill the Ca- 
naanites by thousands ; Catholic Spaniards will 
build the Inquisition for their countrymen ; English 
Protestants, under the bloody Elizabeth, will dip 
their hands in their Catholic brothers' blood ; Puri- 
tan Boston has had her Autos da Fe, hanging 
Quakers for "non-resistance" and the "inner light," 
or witches for a " compact with the Devil." Do 
we not still hang murderers throughout all Chris- 
tendom as an act of worship? This is not done 
as political economy, but as " Divine service " ; 
not for the conversion of man, but in the name of 
God, — one of the few relics of human sacrifice. 
" Reason is carnal," says one priest, — men accept 
a palpable absurdity as a " revealed truth " ; " Con- 
science must not be trusted," says another, — and 
human sacrifice is readily assented to. Nothing 
is so unjust, but men, meaning to be pious, will 
accept and perform it, if commanded in the name 
of religion. In such cases even interest is a feeble 
ally to conscience, and money is sometimes sacri- 
ficed in New England. 

The religious instinct is thus made to trample 
on the affections. At the priest's command, men 
renounce the dearest joys of the heart, degrading 
woman to a mere medium of posterity, or scoffing 
at nature, and vowing shameful oaths of celibacy. 
Puritan mothers feared lest they should " love their 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 153 



children too much." How many a man has made 
his son " pass through the fire unto Moloch 99 ? 
The Protestant thinks it was an act of religion in 
Abraham to sacrifice his only son unto Jehovah ; 
the Catholic still justifies the St. Bartholomew 
massacre. Mankind did not shrink at human sac- 
rifice which was demanded in the name of relig- 
ion terribly perverted. These facts are enough to 
show that the religious faculty is the strongest in 
human nature, and easily snaps all ties which bind 
us to the finite world, making the lover forswear 
his bride, and even the mother forget her child. 

See what an array of means is provided for the 
nurture and development of the religious instinct, — 
provided by God in the constitution of men and 
of the universe. All these things about us, things 
magnificently great, things elegantly little, contin- 
ually impress mankind. Even to the barbarian 
nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous 
wisdom, and continually points to God. I do not 
wonder that men worshipped the several things of 
the world, at first reverencing the Divine in the 
emmet or the crocodile. The world of matter is a 
revelation of fear to the savage in northern climes: 
he trembles at his deity throned in ice and snow. 
The lightning, the storm, the earthquake, startle the 



154 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

rude man, and he sees the Divine in the extraor- 
dinary. 

The grand objects of nature perpetually con- 
strain men to think of their Author. The Alps are 
the great altar of Europe ; the nocturnal sky has 
been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all 
over with admonitions to reverence, trust, and love. 
The Scriptures for mankind are writ in earth and 
heaven. Even now we say, " An undevout astron- 
omer is mad." What a religious mosaic is the 
surface of the earth, — green with vegetable beauty, 
animated with such swarms of life. No organ or 
Pope's Miserere touches my heart like the sono- 
rous swell of the sea, and the ocean wave's im- 
measurable laugh. To me, the works of men who 
report the aspects of nature, like Humboldt, and of 
such as Newton and Laplace, who melt away the 
facts, and leave only the laws, the forces of nature, 
the ideas and ghosts of things, are like tales of a 
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or poetical biogra- 
phies of a saint ; they stir religious feelings and I 
commune with the Infinite. 

This effect is not produced on scholarly men so 
much as on honest and laborious mankind, all the 
world over. Nature is man's religious book, with 
lessons for every day. In cities men tread on an 
artificial ground of brick or stone, breathe an un- 
natural air, see the heavens only a handful at a 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 155 



time, think the gas-lights better than the stars, and 
know little how the stars themselves keep the po- 
lice of the sky. Ladies and gentlemen in towns 
see nature only at second hand. It is hard to de- 
duce God from a brick pavement. Yet ever and 
anon the mould comes out green and natural on 
the walls, and through the chinks of the sidewalks 
bursts up the life of the world in many a little 
plant, which to the microscopic eye of science 
speaks of the presence of the same Power that 
slowly elaborates a solar system and a universe. 
In the country men and women are always in the 
presence of nature, and feel its impulse to rever- 
ence and trust. Every year the old world puts 
on new bridal beauty, and celebrates its "Whitsun- 
day, — each bush putting on its glory. Spring 
is our Dominica in Albis. Is not autumn a long 
All-Saints' day ? The harvest is Hallowmass to 
mankind. How men have marked each annual 
crisis of the year, — the solstice and the equinox, 
— and celebrate religious festivals thereon! The 
material world is the element of communion be- 
tween man and God. To heedful men God preach- 
es on every mount, utters beatitudes in each little 
flower of spring. 

Our own nature also reminds us of God. 
Thoughtful men are conscious of their depend- 
ence, their imperfection, their finiteness^ and nat- 



156 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

urally turn to the Independent, the Perfect, the 
Infinite. The events of life, its joys and its sor- 
rows, have a natural tendency to direct the thoughts 
to the good Father of us all. Religious emotions 
spring up spontaneously at each great event in 
the lives of earnest men. When I am sick I be- 
come conscious of the Infinite Mother in whose 
lap I lay my weary head. The lover's eyes see 
God beyond the maid he loves ; Heaven speaks 
out of the helpless face which the young mother 
presses to her bosom ; each new child connects 
its parents with the eternal duration of human 
kind. Who can wait on the ebb and flow of mor- 
tal life in a friend, and not return to Him who 
holds that ocean also in the hollow of his hand! 
The old man looking for the last time upon the sun 
turns his children's face towards that Sun which 
never sets. Even in cities men do not pause at a 
funeral or look on a grave without a thought of 
the eternal life beyond the tomb, and the depend- 
ence of rich and poor on the God who is father of 
body and soul. The hearse obstructs the omni- 
bus of commerce, and draws the eyes of even the 
silly and the vain and empty creatures who buzz 
out their ephemeral phenomena in wealthy towns, 
the butterflies of this garden of bricks, and forces 
them to confront one reality of life, and reverence, 
though only with a shudder, the Author of all. The 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 157 

undertaker is a priest to preach terror, if no more, 
to the poor flies of metropolitan frivolity, remind- 
ing them at least of the worm. 

The outward material world forms a temple 
where all invites us to reverence the Soul which 
inspires it with life ; the spiritual powers within 
are all instinctively astir with feelings infinite. 
Thus material nature joins with human nature in 
natural fellowship ; outward occasions and inward 
means of piety are bountifully given, and man is 
led to develop his religious powers. The soul of 
man cannot well be still ; religion has always had 
a powerful activity in the world, and a great in- 
fluence upon the destiny of mankind. The soul 
has been as active as the sense, and left its monu- 
ments. 

An element thus powerful, thus well appointed 
with outward and with inward helps, must have 
a purpose for the individual and the race com- 
mensurate with its natural power. The affections 
tell me it is not good for man to be alone in the 
body without a friend ; the soul as imperatively 
informs us that we cannot be alone in the spirit 
without a consciousness of God. If the religious 
faculty has overpowered all others, and often trod 
them under foot, its very power shows for what 

14 



158 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

great good to mankind it was invested with this 
formidable force. It will act, jointly or alone ; if it 
have not its proper place, working harmoniously 
with the intellect, the conscience, and the affec- 
tions in the mass of men, then it will tyrannize as 
a brute instinct, lusting after God, and, like a river 
that bursts its bounds, sweep off the holy joys of 
men before its desolating flood. 

The mind may work without a corresponding 
action of the conscience or the heart. You can 
comprehend the worth of a man all head, with no 
sense of right, no love of men, with nothing but 
a demon-brain. Conscience may act with no 
corresponding life of the affections and the mind. 
You can understand the value of a man all con- 
science and will, — nothing but an incarnate moral 
law, the "categorical Imperative" exhibited in the 
flesh, with no wisdom and no love. A life domi- 
neered over by conscience is unsatisfying, melan- 
choly, and grim. The affections may also have a 
development without the moral and the mental 
powers. But what is a man domineered over by 
his heart ; with no justice, no wisdom, nothing 
but a lump of good nature, partial and silly ? It 
is only the rareness of such phenomena that makes 
them bearable. Truth, justice, love, — it is not 
good for them to be alone ; each loses two thirds 
of the human power when it expels the sister 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOULc 159 

virtues from it. What God has joined must not 
be put asunder. 

The religious faculty may be perverted, severed 
from the rest and made to act alone, with no cor- 
responding action of the mind, the conscience, 
and the heart. Attempts are often made to pro- 
duce this independent development of the soul. 
It is no new thing to seek to develop piety while 
you omit its several elements, the intellectual love 
of truth, the moral love of justice, and the affec- 
tional love of men. But in such a case what is 
the value of the " piety " thus produced ? The soul 
acting without the mind goes to superstition and 
bigotry. It has its conception of God, but of a 
God that is foolish and silly. Reason will be 
thought carnal, science dangerous, and a doubt an 
impiety ; the greatest absurdities will be taught in 
the name of religion ; the philosophy of some half- 
civilized, but God-fearing people, will be put upon 
the minds of men as the word of God ; the priest 
will hate the philosopher, and the philosopher the 
priest ; men of able intellect will flee off and loathe 
ecclesiastical piety. If the churches will have a 
religion without philosophy, scholars will have a 
philosophy without religion. The Roman Church 
forbid science, burnt Jordano Bruno, and reduced 
Galileo to silence and his knees. So much the 
worse for the Church. The French philosophy of 



160 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

the last century, its Encyclopaedia of scoffs at re- 
ligion, were the unavoidable counterpart. Vol- 
taire and Diderot took vengeance for the injustice 
done to their philosophic forerunners. The fag- 
ots of the Middle Ages got repaid by the fiery 
press of the last generation. 

You may try and develop the soul to the neg- 
lect of conscience ; — your Antinomian will rec- 
ognize no moral law : " All things are permissible 
to the elect; let them do what they will, they can- 
not sin, for they are born of God ; the moral law 
is needless under the Gospel," says he. Relig- 
ion will be made the pander of wrong, and priests 
will pimp for respectable iniquity. God is thus 
represented as unjust, partial, cruel, and full of 
vengeance. The most unjust things will be de- 
manded in his name ; the laws and practices of a 
barbarous nation will be ascribed to God, and men 
told to observe and keep them. Religion will aim 
to conserve the ritual barbarities of ruder times ; 
moral works will be thought hostile to piety ; good- 
ness regarded as of no value, rather as proof that 
a man is not under the " covenant of grace," but 
only of works. Conscience will be thought an 
uncertain guide. No " higher law" will be allowed 
in religion, — only the interest of the politician and 
the calculation of the merchant must bear rule in 
the state. The whim of some priest, a new or an 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 161 

old traditionary whim, must be the rule in the 
Church. It will then be taught that religion is 
for the Sunday and holy communion ; business for 
the week, and daily life. The most respectable 
churches will be such as do nothing to make the 
world a better place, and men and women fitter 
to live in it. The catechism will have nothing to 
do with the conduct, nor prayers with practice. If 
the churches will have religion without morals, 
many a good and conscientious man will go to 
the opposite extreme, and have morals without 
religion, — will jeer and mock at all complete and 
conscious piety ; eminently moral men will flee off 
from the churches, which will be left with their 
idle mummeries and vain conceits. 

Men sometimes seek to develop the religious 
element while they depress the affectional. Then 
they promote fanaticism, hate before God, which 
so often has got organized in the world. Then 
God is represented as jealous, partial, loving only 
a few, and of course Himself unlovely. He sits as 
a tyrant on the throne of the world, and with his 
rod of iron rules the nations whom he has created 
for his glory, to damn for his caprice. He is rep- 
resented as having a little, narrow heaven, where 
he will gather a few of his children, whining and 
dawdling out a life of eternal indolence; and a 
great, wide hell, full of men, demons, and torments 

14* 



162 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



lasting for ever and ever. Then, in the name of 
God, men are bid to have no fellowship with un- 
believers, no sympathy with sinners. Nay, you 
are bidden to hate your brethren of a different 
mode of religious belief. This fanaticism organ- 
izes itself, now into brief and temporary activity, 
to persecute a saint, or to stone a philanthro- 
pist ; now into permanent institutions for the de- 
fence of heathenism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, 
or Christianity. The fires in which Catholics and 
Protestants have burnt their brother Christians, 
the dreadful tortures which savage heathens have 
inflicted on the followers of Jesus, have all been 
prepared by the same cause, hatred in the name 
of God. It is this which has made many a tem- 
porary hell on earth, and fancied and taught an 
eternal hell beneath it. Brief St. Bartholomew 
massacres, long and lasting crusades against Albi- 
genses or Saracens, permanent Inquisitions, laws 
against unbelievers, atheists, Quakers, deists, and 
Christians, all spring from this same wantonness 
of the religious sentiment rioting with ungod- 
ly passions of the flesh. The malignant priest 
looks out of the storm of his hate, and smites men 
in the name of religion and of God. But then the 
affectionate man tarns off from the God that is "a 
consuming fire," from the " religion " that scorches 
and burns up the noblest emotions of mankind, 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 163 

and, if others will have a worship without love in 
the worshippers or the worshipped, he will have 
love without religion, and philanthropy without 
God. So, in the desert, the Arab sees the whirl- 
wind coming with its tornado of fiery sand, and 
hastens from its track, or lies down, he and his 
camels, till the horrid storm has spent its rage and 
passed away ; then he rises and resumes his peace- 
ful pilgrimage with thanks to God. 

How strong is the family instinct ! how beau- 
tiful is it when, passion and affection blending to- 
gether, it joins man and maid into one complete 
and perfect solidarity of human life, each find- 
ing wholeness and enjoyment while seeking only 
to delight! "What beautiful homes are built on 
marriages like that ! what families of love are born 
and bred therein ! but take away the affection, 
the self-denial, the mutual surrender, aggravate the 
instinctive love to the unnatural selfishness of lust 
seeking its own enjoyment, heedless of its victim, 
and how hateful is the beastly conjunction of Da- 
vid, Solomon, Messallina, Mohammed, of Gallic 
Cassanova, or Moscovian Catharine. Religion be- 
reft of love to men becomes more hateful yet, — a 
lusting after God. It has reddened with blood 
many a page of human history, and made the 
ideal torments of hell a flaming fact in every 
Christian land. The Catharines of such religion, 



164 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

the Cassanovas of the soul, are to me more hideous 
than Bacchanalians of the flesh. Let us turn off 
our eyes from a sight so foul. 

Piety of mind, the love of truth, is only a frag- 
ment of piety; piety of conscience, the love of 
right, is also fragmentary ; so is love of men, piety 
of the heart. Each is a beautiful fragment, all 
three not a whole piety. We want to unite them 
all with the consciousness of God, into a complete, 
perfect, and total religion, the piety of mind and 
conscience, heart and soul, — to love God with all 
the faculties, — to love Him as truth, as justice, as 
love, as God, who unites in Himself infinite truth, 
infinite justice, infinite love, and is the Father of 
all. We need to do this consciously, to be so 
wonted to thus loving Him, that it is done spon- 
taneously, without effort, and yet not merely by 
instinct; done personally, not against our own con- 
sent. Then we want to express this fourfold total 
piety by our outward morality, in its natural forms 
and various degrees. 

I mentioned, that in human history the religious 
faculty had often tyrannized over the other powers 
of men ; I think it should precede them in its 
development, should be the controlling power in 
every man, the universal force which sways the 
several parts, In the history of man the soul has 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 165 



done so, but in most perverse forms of action. In 
the mass of men the religious element is always a 
little in advance of all the rest. Last Sunday I 
said that the affections often performed an ideal- 
izing and poetizing function in men who found it 
not in the intellect or the moral sense. In the 
vast majority of men it is religion that thus ideal- 
izes and adorns their life, and gives the rude wor- 
shipper an intimate gladness and delight beyond 
the reach of art. The doctrine of Fate and Fore- 
ordination idealizes the life of the Mohammedan; 
he feels elevated to the rank of an instrument of 
God ; he has an inflexible courage, and a patience 
which bears all that courage cannot overcome. 
The camel-driver of the Arabian prophet rejoiced 
in this intimate connection with God, a spoke in 
the wheel of the Unalterable. The thought that 
God watched over Israel with special love, consoled 
the Hebrews who hung their harps on the willows 
of Babylon, and sat down and wept ; it brought 
out of their hearts stories like that of Jonah, Esther, 
and Daniel, and the sweet Psalms of comfort which 
the world will not forget to sing. How it has 
sustained the nation, wandering, exiled and hated, 
in all the corners of the world! The God of Jacob 
is their refuge and the Holy One of Israel the joy 
of their hearts. Faith in God sustained and com- 
forted our fathers here in New England. Their 



166 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

affections went wandering over the waters to many 
a pleasant home in the dear old island of the sea, 
and a tear fell on the snow, at the thought that, 
far over the waters, the first violet was fragrant on 
a mother's grave ; but the consciousness of God lit 
a smile in the Puritan's heart which chased the 
tear from his manly cheek. 

The thought that God sees us, knows us, loves 
us, idealizes the life of all religious men. How 
it blunts the edge of pain, takes away the sting of 
disappointment, abates the bitterness of many a 
sorrowful cup that we are called to drink. If you 
are sure of God, is there any thing which you 
cannot bear ? The belief in immortality is so 
intimately connected with the development of re- 
ligion, that no nation ever doubted of eternal life. 
How that idealizes and embellishes all our daily 
doing and suffering! "What a power is there that 
hangs over me, within a day's march perhaps, 
nay, within an easy walk of an hour, or a minute 
it may be, certainly not far off, its gates wide open 
night and day ! The weary soul flees thither right 
often. Poor, weary, worn-out millions, it is your 
heaven ! No king can shut you out. The tyrants, 
shooting their victim's body, shoot his soul into 
the commonwealth of heaven. The martyr knows 
it, and laughs at the bullets which make an invol- 
untary subject of despotism an immortal repub- 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 167 

lican, giving him citizenship in the democracy of 
everlasting life. There the slave is free from his 
master; the weary is at rest; the needy has no want 
of bread ; all tears are wiped from every eye ; jus- 
tice is done ; souls dear to ours are in our arms 
once more; the distractions of life are all over; no 
injustice, no sorrow, no fear. That is the great 
comfort with the mass of mankind, — the most 
powerful talisman which enchants them of their 
weary love. Men sing Anacreontic odes, amid 
wine and women, and all the voluptuousness of 
art, buying a transient jollity of the flesh ; but the 
Methodist finds poetry in his mystic hymn to take 
away the grief of a wound and leave no poison 
in its place. The rudest Christian, with a real 
faith in immortal life, has a means of adorning the 
world which puts to shame the poor finery of Nich- 
olas and Nebuchadnezzar. What are the prizes 
of wealth, of fame, of genius, nay, of affection, 
compared with what we all anticipate ere long? 
The worst man that ever lived may find delight 
overmastering terror here. " I am wicked," he may 
say ; " God knows how I became so ; his infinite 
love will one day save me out of my bitterness 
and my woe!" I once knew a man tormented 
with a partner, cruel and hard-hearted, ingenious 
only to afflict. In the midst of her torment he 
delighted to think of the goodness of God, and of 



168 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

the delights of heaven, and in the pauses of her 
tongue dropped to a heaven of lovely dreams 
unsullied by any memory of evil words. 

Religion does not produce its fairest results in 
persons of small intellectual culture ; yet there it 
often spreads a charm and a gladness which noth- 
ing else can give. I have known men, and still 
oftener women, nearly all of whose culture had 
come through their religious activity. Religion 
had helped their intellect, their conscience, even 
their affections ; by warming the whole ground of 
their being, had quickened the growth of each 
specific plant thereof. Young observers are often 
amazed at this, not knowing then the greener 
growth and living power of a religious soul. In 
such persons, spite of lack of early intellectual 
culture, and continual exclusion from the common 
means of refinement, you find piety without nar- 
rowness, zeal without bigotry, and trust in God 
with no cant. Their world of observation was 
not a wide world, not much varied, not rich ; but 
their religious experience was deep, their con- 
sciousness of divine things extended high. They 
were full of love and trust in God. Religion was 
the joy of their heart, and their portion for ever. 
They felt that God was about them, immanent 
in matter, within not less, dwelling in their spirit, 
a present help in their hour of need, which was 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 169 

their every hour. Piety was their only poetry ; 
out of ignorance, out of want, out of pain, which 
lay heavy about them, — a triple darkness that cov- 
ered the people, — they looked up to heaven, and 
saw the star of everlasting life, which sent its mild 
beams into their responsive soul. Dark without, 
it was all-glorious within. Men with proud intel- 
lect go haughtily by such humble souls ; but Mo- 
hammeds, Luthers, are born of such a stock, and 
it is from these little streams that the great ocean 
of religion is filled full. 

Yet it is not in cases like these that you see the 
fairest effects of religion. The four prismatic rays 
of piety must be united into one natural and four- 
fold beam of light, to shine with all their beauty, 
all their power ; then each is enhanced. I love 
truth the more for loving justice ; both the more 
for loving love ; all three the more, when I see 
them as forms of God ; and in a totality of re- 
ligion I worship the Father, who is truth, justice, 
and love, who is the Infinite God. 

The affections want a person to cling to ; — my 
soul reveals to me God, without the limitations of 
human personality ; Him I can love, and not be 
narrowed by my affections. If I love a limited 
object, I grow up to the bigness thereof, then stop; 
it helps my growth no more. The finiteness of 
my friend admits no absolute affection. Partial 

15 



170 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

love must not disturb the universal sweep of im- 
personal truth and justice. The object of the 
heart must not come between me and the object 
of mind or conscience, and enfeeble the man. 
But if you love the Infinite God, it is with all 
your faculties, which find their complete and per- 
fect object, and you progressively grow up to- 
wards Him, to be like Him. The idea of God be- 
comes continually more, your achievement of the 
divine becomes more. You love with no divided 
love ; there is no collision of faculties, the head 
forbidding what the soul commands, the heart 
working one way and the conscience another. 
The same Object corresponds to all these facul- 
ties, which love Him as truth, as justice, as love, 
as God who is all in all; one central sun balances 
and feeds with fire this system of harmonious 
orbs. 

Consider the power of religion in a man whose 
mind and conscience, heart and soul, are all well 
developed. He has these four forms of piety ; they 
all unite, each to all, and all to each. His mind 
gives him knowledge of truth, the necessary con- 
dition for the highest action of his conscience ; 
that furnishes him with the idea of justice, which 
is the necessary condition for the highest action of 
the affections ; they in their development extend 
to all in their wide love of men ; this affords the 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 171 



necessary condition for the highest action of the 
soul, which can then love God with absolute love, 
and, joining with all the other activity of the man, 
helps the use, development, and enjoyment of 
every faculty. Then truth has lost its coldness ; 
justice is not hard and severe; love is not partial, 
as when limited to family, tribe, or nation, but, 
coextensive with justice, applies to all mankind; 
faith is not mystical or merely introversive and 
quietistic. This fourfold action joins in one unity 
of worship, — in love of God, love with the high- 
est and conjoint action of all the faculties of man. 
Then love of the Infinite God is no mystical ab- 
straction, no dreamy sentimentalism, but the nor- 
mal action of the entire man, every faculty seeking 
its finite contentment, and finding also its infinite 
satisfaction by feeling the life of God in the soul 
of man. 

In our time, as often before, attempts are making 
to cultivate the soul, in the narrowest way, with- 
out developing the other parts of man's spiritual 
nature. The intellect is called " carnal," con- 
science " dangerous," and the heart " deceitful." 
We are told to trust none of these in matters of 
religion. Accordingly, ecclesiastical men com- 
plain that " science is not religious," because it 
breaks down the " venerable doctrines " of the 



172 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



Church, — because geologists have swept away 
the flood, grammarians annihilated the tower of 
Babel, and physiologists brushed off the miracles 
of the Jews, the Greeks, the Hindoos, and the 
Christians, to the same dust-hole of the ages and 
repository of rubbish. It is complained that " mo- 
rality is not religious," because it refuses to be 
comforted with the forms of religious ceremony, 
and thinks "divine service" is not merely sitting 
in a church, or listening to even the wisest words. 
The churches complain also that " philanthropy 
is not religious," but love of men dissuades us 
from love of God. The philanthropist looks out 
on the evils of society, — on the slavery whose 
symbol is the lash, and the slavery whose symbol 
is the dollar; on the avarice, the intemperance, the 
licentiousness of men ; and calls on mankind in 
the name of God to put away all this wickedness. 
The churches say : " Rather receive our sacraments. 
Religion has nothing to do with such matters." 

This being the case, men of powerful character 
no longer betake themselves to the Church as their 
fortress whence to assail the evils of the age, or as 
their hermitage wherein to find rest for their souls. 
In all England there are few men, I think, of first- 
rate ability who speak from a pulpit. Let me do 
no injustice to minds like three great men honor- 
ing her pulpits now, but England certainly has 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 173 

do clerical scholars to rival the intellectual afflu- 
ence of Hooker, and Barrow, and Taylor, and 
Cudworth, and South. The great names of Eng- 
lish literature at this day, Carlyle, Hallam, Ma- 
caulay, Mill, Grote, and the rest, seem far enough 
from the Church, or its modes of salvation. The 
counting-house sends out men to teach political 
economy, looking always to the kitchen of the 
nation, and thinking of the stomach of the people. 
Does the Church send out men of corresponding 
power to think of the soul of the nation, and teach 
the people political morality ? Was Bishop Butler 
the last of the great men who essayed to teach 
Britain from her established pulpit ? Even Priest- 
ley has few successors in the ranks of religious 
dissent. The same may be said of Church poets : 
they are often well-bred ; what one of them is 
there that was well born for his high vocation? 

In the American Church there is the same fam- 
ine of men. Edwards and Mayhew belonged to 
a race now extinct, — great men in pulpits. In 
our literature there are names enough once cleri- 
cal. The very fairest names of our little hill of 
the Muses are of men once clergymen. Channing 
is the only one in this country who continued thus 
to the end of life. A crowd of able men, with a 
mob of others, press into all departments of trade, 
into the profession of the law, and the headlong 

15 * 



174 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

race of American politics. — where a reputation is 
gained without a virtue or lost without a crime, 
— but no men of first-rate powers and attainments 
continue in the pulpit. Hence we have strong- 
minded men in business, in politics, and law, who 
teach men the principles which seem to suit the 
evanescent interests of the day, but few in pul- 
pits, to teach men the eternal principles of justice, 
which really suit the everlasting interests of man- 
kind. Hence no popular and deadly sin of the na- 
tion gets well rebuked by the Church of the Times. 
The dwarfs of the pulpit hide their diminished 
heads before the Anakim of politics and trade. 
The almighty dollar hunts wisdom, justice, and 
philanthropy out of the American Church. It is 
only among the fanatical Mormons that the ablest 
men teach in the name of God. 

The same is mainly true of all Christendom. 
The Church which in her productive period had 
an Origen, a Chrysostom, an Augustine, a Jerome, 
an Aquinas, its Gregories and its Basils, its real 
saints and willing martyrs, in the nineteenth cen- 
tury cannot show a single mind which is a guide 
of the age. The great philosophers of Europe are 
far enough from Christian. 

It is, doubtless, a present misfortune that the po- 
sitions most favorable to religious influence are 
filled with feeble men, or such as care little for the 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 175 

welfare of mankind, — who have all of religion, 
except its truth, its justice, its philanthropy, and 
its faith. Still, such is the fact just now ; a fact 
which shows plainly enough the position of what 
is popularly called " Christianity " in the world of 
men. The form of religion first proclaimed by the 
greatest religious genius that ever lit the world, 
and sealed by his martyrdom, is now officially 
represented by men of vulgar talents, of vulgar as- 
pirations, — to be rich, respectable, and fat, — and 
of vulgar lives. Hunkers of the Church claim ex- 
clusively to represent the martyr of the Cross. A 
sad sight ! 

Yet still religion is a great power amongst men, 
spite of these disadvantages. It was never so 
great before ; for in the progressive development of 
mankind the higher faculties acquire continually 
a greater and greater power. If Christianity 
means what was true and good in the teaching 
and character of Jesus, then there was never so 
much of it in the world. Spite of the defalcation 
and opposition of the churches, there is a contin- 
ual growth in all those four forms of piety. Un- 
der the direction of able men, all those fragments 
of religion are made ready in their several places. 
In the department of mind, see how much has 
been done in this last hundred years ; man has 
nearly doubled the intellectual property of the 



176 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

seventeenth century. The early history of man- 
kind is better understood than by the nations who 
lived it. "What discoveries of science in all that 
relates to the heavens, to the earth and its inhab- 
itants, mineral, vegetable, animal, human ! In the 
philosophy of man, how much has been done to 
understand his nature and his history ! In prac- 
tical affairs, see what wonders have been wrought 
in a hundred years ; look at England, France, 
Germany, and America, and see the power of the 
scientific head over the world of matter, the hu- 
man power gained by better political organization 
of the tribes of men. 

In the department of conscience, see what a 
love of justice develops itself in all Christendom ; 
see the results of this for the last hundred years ; 
the reform of laws, of constitutions, in the great 
political, social, and domestic revolutions of our 
time. Men have clearer ideas of justice; they 
would have a church without a bishop, a state 
without a king, society without a lord, and a fam- 
ily without a slave. From this troublesome con- 
science comes the uneasiness of the Christian 
world. A revolution is a nation's act of peni- 
tence, of resolution, and of prayer, — its agony and 
bloody sweat. See what a love of freedom there 
is shaking the institutions of the aged world. 
Tyrannies totter before the invisible hand of Jus- 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 177 



tice, which, to the terror of the oppressors, writes, 
" Weighed, and found wanting." So the despot 
trembles for his guilty throne ; the slave-driver be- 
gins to fear the God of the man he has kidnapped 
and enthralled. See the attempts making by the 
people to break down monopolies, to promote 
freedom of intercourse between all nations of the 
earth. See woman assert her native rights, long 
held in abeyance by the superior vigor of the 
manly arm. 

In all that pertains to the affections, there has 
been a great advance. Love travels beyond the 
narrow bounds of England and of Christendom. 
See the efforts making to free the slave ; to elevate 
the poor, — removing the causes of poverty by the 
charity that alleviates and the justice that cures ; 
to heal the drunkard of his fiery thirst ; to reform 
the criminals whom once we only hung. The 
gallows must come down, the dungeon be a school 
for piety, not the den of vengeance and of rage. 
Great pains begin to be taken with the deaf and 
dumb, the blind, the insane ; even the idiot must 
be taught. Philanthropic men, who are freedom 
to the slave, feet to the lame, eyes to the blind, 
and hearing to the deaf, would be also under- 
standing to the fool. In what is idly called " an 
age of faith," the town council of Grenoble set 
archers at the gates, to draw upon strange beggars 



178 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



and shoot them down before the city walls. Look, 
now, at the New England provision for the des- 
titute, — for the support of their bodies and the 
culture of their minds. 

No Church leads off in these movements ; eccle- 
siastical men take small interest therein ; but they 
come from the three partial forms of piety, the 
intellectual, the moral, and the affection al. We 
need to have these all united with a conscious 
love of God. What hinders ? The old ecclesias- 
tical idea of God, as finite, imperfect in wisdom, 
in justice, and in love, still blocks the way. The 
God wholly external to the world of matter, acting 
by fits and starts, is not God enough for science, 
which requires a uniform, infinite force, with con- 
stant modes of action. The capricious Deity, 
wholly external to the human spirit, — jealous, 
partial, loving Jacob and hating Esau, revengeful, 
blasting with endless hell all but a fraction of his 
family, — this is not God enough for the scientific 
moralist, and the philanthropist running over with 
love. They want a God immanent in matter, 
immanent in spirit, yet infinite, and so transcend- 
ing both, — the God of infinite perfection, infi- 
nite power, wisdom, justice, love, and self-fidelity. 
This idea is a stranger to the Christian, as to the 
Hebrew and Mohammedan church ; and so stout 
men turn off therefrom, or else are driven away 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 179 

with hated names. One day these men will wel- 
come the true idea of God, and have a conscious 
trust and love of Him to match their science, their 
justice, and their love of men ; will become the 
prophets and apostles of the Absolute Religion, 
finding it wide enough for all truth, all justice, and 
all love, yea, for an absolute faith in God, in his 
motives, means, and ends. Then all this science 
of the nineteenth century, all this practical energy, 
this wide command over nature, this power to 
organize the world of matter and yoke it to the 
will of man, this love of freedom and power to 
combine vast masses in productive industry ; then 
all this wide literature of modern times, glittering 
with many-colored riches, and spread abroad so 
swift ; then all this morality which clamors for the 
native right of men, this wide philanthropy, lay- 
ing down its life to bless mankind, — all this shall 
join with the natural emotions of the soul, wel- 
coming the Infinite God. It shall all unite into 
one religion ; each part thereof " may call the 
farthest brother." Then what a work will religion 
achieve in the affairs of men ! What institutions 
will it build, what welfare will it produce on earth, 
what men bring forth ! Even now the several 
means are working for this one great end, only 
not visiblv, not with the consciousness of men. 



180 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

I do not complain of the " decline of piety.' 5 I 
thank God for its increase. I see what has been 
done, but I look also to what remains to do. I 
am sure that mankind will do it. God is a master 
workman ; He made man well, — for an end wor- 
thy of God, provided with means quite adequate 
to that end. No man, not an Isaiah or a Jesus, 
ever dares prophesy so high but man fulfils the 
oracle, and then goes dreaming his prophecy anew, 
and fulfilling it as he goes on. If you have got 
a true idea of justice, a true sentiment of philan- 
thropy or of faith in God, which men have not 
yet welcomed, if you can state your idea in speech, 
then mankind will stop and realize your idea, — 
make your abstract thought their concrete thing. 
Kings are nothing, armies fall before you. The 
idea swings them in its flight as the wind of 
summer bows the unripe corn of June. 

This religion will build temples, not of stone 
only, but temples of living stones, temples of 
men, families, communities, nations, and a world. 
We want no monarchies in the name of God ; we 
do want a democracy in that name, a democracy 
that rests on human nature, and, respecting that, 
reenacts the natural laws of God, the Constitu- 
tion of the Universe, in the common statutes and 
written laws of the land. 

We need this religion for its general and its spe- 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 181 

cial purposes ; need it as subjective piety in each 
of these fragmentary forms, as joined into totality 
of religious consciousness ; we need it as morality, 
keeping the natural laws of God for the body and the 
spirit, in the individual, domestic, social, national, 
and general human or cosmic form, the divine 
sentiment becoming the human act. We need 
this to heal the vices of modern society, to revo- 
lutionize this modern feudalism of gold, and join 
the rich and poor, the employer and the employed, 
in one bond of human fellowship ; we need it to 
break down the wall between class and class, na- 
tion and nation, race and race, — to join all classes 
into one nation, all nations into one great human 
family. Science alone is not adequate to achieve 
this ; calculations of interest cannot effect it ; po- 
litical economy will not check the iron hand of 
power, nor relax the grasp of the oppressor from 
his victim's throat. Only religion, deep, wide- 
spread, and true, can achieve this great work. 

Already it is going forward, not under the guid- 
ance of one great man with ideas to direct the 
march, and mind to plan the structure of the future 
age, but under many men, who know each his 
little speciality, all their several parts, while the 
Infinite Architect foresees and so provides for all. 
Much has been done in this century, now only 
half spent ; much more is a-doing. But the great- 

16 



182 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

est of its works is one men do not talk about, nor 
see ; it is the silent development of the several 
parts of a complete piety, one day to be united 
into a consciousness of the Absolute Religion, 
and to be the parent of a new church and new 
state, with communities and families such as the 
world has hitherto not seen. 

We notice the material works of our time, the 
industrial activity, the rapid increase of wealth in 
either England, Old or New. Foolish men de- 
plore this, and would go back to the time when 
an ignorant peasantry, clad in sheep-skins, full of 
blind, instinctive faith in God, and following only 
as they were led by men, built up the cathedrals 
of Upsala and Strasburg. In the order of devel- 
opment, the material comes first; even the exces- 
sive lust of gain, now turning the heads of Old 
England and the New, is part of the cure of the 
former unnatural mistake. Gross poverty is on 
its way to the grave. The natural man is before 
the spiritual man. We are laying a basis for a 
spiritual structure which no man has genius yet 
to plan. Years ago there were crowds of men at 
work in Lebanon, cutting down the algum, the 
cedai*, and the fir, squaring into ashlar, boring, chis- 
elling, mortising, tenoning, all manner of beams; 
some were rafting it along the coast to Joppa, and 
yet others teaming it up to Jerusalem. What 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 183 



sweat of horses was there, what lowing of oxen 
and complaint from the camels ! Thousands of 
men were quarrying stone at Moriah for the foun- 
dation of the work. Yet only one man understood 
it all ; the lumberers felling the cedar and syca- 
more, the carpenters and the muleteers, understood 
each their special work, no more. But the son 
of the Danite woman planned all this stone and 
timber into a temple, which, by the labor of all 
and the consciousness of a few, rose up on the 
mountain of Jerusalem, the wonder and the pride 
of all the land. So the great work, the humani- 
zation of man, is going forward. The girl that 
weaves muslins at Brussels, the captain of the 
emigrant ship sailing " past bleak Mozambique," 
hungry for Australian gold, the chemist who an- 
nihilates pain with a gas and teaches lightning to 
read and write, the philosopher who tells us the 
mighty faculties which lie hid in labyrinthine 
man, and the philanthropic maiden who in the 
dirt of a worldly city lives love which some theo- 
logians think is too much for God, — all of these, 
and thousands more, are getting together and pre- 
paring the materials for the great temple of man, 
whose builder and maker is God. You and I 
shall pass away, but mankind is the true son of 
God that abideth ever, to whom the Father says 
continually, " Come up higher." 



184 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 

I see the silent growth of religion in men. I see 
that the spiritual elements are a larger fraction of 
human consciousness than ever before ; that there 
is more of truth, of justice, of love, and faith in 
God than was ever in the world. As we know 
and observe the natural laws of man, the consti- 
tution of the universe, the more, so will this re- 
ligion continue to increase, and the results thereof 
appear in common life, in the individual, domes- 
tic, social, national, and universal human form. 

Some men say they cannot love, or even know, 
God, except in the form of man. God as the In- 
finite seems to them abstract, and they cannot lay 
hold on Him until a man fills their corporeal eye 
and arms, and the affections cling thereto and are 
blest. So they love Christ, — not the Jesus of his- 
tory, but the Christ of the Christian mythology, — 
an ideal incarnation of God in man. Let them 
help themselves with this crutch of the fancy, as 
boys use sticks to leap a ditch or spring a wall ; 
yet let them remember that the real historical in- 
carnation of God is in mankind, not in one form, 
but all, and human history is a continual trans- 
figuration. As the Divine seems nearest when 
human, and men have loved to believe in the 
union of God and man, so religion is loveliest 
when it assumes the form of common life, — when 
daily work is a daily sacrament, and life itself a 
psalm of gratitude and prayer of aspiration. 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 185 

It is Palm Sunday to-day, and men in churches 
remember what is written of the peasant from 
Galilee who rode into Jerusalem amid multitudes 
of earnest men not merely waiting for consola- 
tion, but going to meet it half way, who yet 
knew not what they did, nor whom they wel- 
comed. As that man went to the capital of a 
nation that knew him not, so in our time Re- 
ligion rides her ass-colt into village and town, 
welcome to many a weary, toiling heart, but ig- 
nored and pelted by the successors of such as 
" took counsel against Jesus, to put him to death." 
How little do we know ! But he that keeps the 
integrity of his own consciousness, and is faithful 
to himself day by day, is also faithful to God for 
eternity, and helps to restore the integrity of the 
world of men. 

The religious actions of old times it is now easy 
to understand. They left their monuments, their 
pyramids, and temples which they built, the mem- 
ory of the wars they fought against their brothers 
in the dear name of Jesus, or of Allah the Only. 
But the religious action of this age, not in the old 
form, — it will take the next generation to under- 
stand that. My friends, this is a young nation, 
new as yet ; you and I can do something to mould 
its destiny. There are millions before us. They 
will fulfil our prophecy, the truer the fairer. Our 

16* 



186 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL. 



sentiment of religion,, our ideas thereof, if true, 
shall bless them in their deepest, dearest life. 
They will rejoice if we shall break the yokes from 
off their necks, and rend asunder the old tradition- 
ary veil which hides from them their Father's face. 
All of your piety, partial or total, shall go down to 
gladden the faces of your children, and to bless 
their souls for ever and for ever. 



VI. 



OF THE CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



LET US GO ON UNTO PERFECTION, — - Heb. YL 1. 

The highest product of a nation is its men ; of 
you and me is our character, the life which we 
make out of our time. Our reputation is what 
we come to be thought of, our character what we 
come to be. In this character the most important 
element is the religious, for it is to be the guide 
and director of all the rest, the foundation-element 
of human excellence. 

In general our character is the result of three 
factors, namely, of our Nature, both that which is 
human, and which we have as men in common 
with all mankind, and that which is individual, 
and which we have as Sarah or George, in distinc- 
tion from all men ; next, of the Educational Forces 
about us ; and, finally, of our own Will, which we 
exercise, and so determine the use we make of the 



188 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

two other factors ; for it is for us to determine 
whether we will lie flat before natural instincts and 
educational forces, or modify their action upon us. 

What is true in general of all culture is true in 
special of religious education. Religious character 
is the result of these three factors. 

I suppose every earnest man, who knows what 
religion is, desires to become a religious man, to 
do the most of religious duty, have the most of 
religious rights, and enjoy the most of religious 
welfare ; to give the most for God, and receive the 
most from Him. It does not always appear so, 
yet really is. At the bottom of our hearts we all 
wish for that. We have been misled by blind 
guides, who did not always mean to deceive us; 
we have often gone astray, led oft' by our instinc- 
tive passion in youth, our voluntary calculation in 
manhood, yet never meaning to deceive ourselves. 
But there is none of us who does not desire to be 
a religious man, — at least, I never met a man 
who confessed it, or of whom I thought it true. 
But, of course, they desire it with various degrees 
of will. 

Writers often divide men into two classes, saints 
and sinners. I like not the division. The best 
men are bad enough in their own eyes. I hope 
God is better pleased with men than we are with 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 189 

ourselves, there are so many things in us all which 
are there against our consent, — evil tenants which 
we cannot get rid of as yet. That smoky chimney 
of an ill-temper is a torment to poor Mr. Fiery, 
which he has not had courage or strength to re- 
move in fifty winters. To " see ourselves as others 
see us," would often minister to pride and con- 
ceit ; how many naughty things, actions and emo- 
tions too, I know of myself, which no calumniator 
ever casts in my teeth. Yet take the worst men 
that you can find, — men that rob on the highway 
with open violence, pirates on the sea, the more 
dangerous thieves who devour widows' houses and 
plunder the unprotected in a manner thoroughly 
legal, respectable, and " Christian," men that steal 
from the poor ; — take the tormentors of the Span- 
ish Inquisition, assassins and murderers from New 
York and Naples, nay, the men who in Boston 
are willing to kidnap their fellow-citizens for ten 
dollars a head, and send them and their posterity 
into the perennial torture of American slavery; — 
even these men would curl and shudder at the 
thought of being without consciousness of God in 
the world ; of living without any religion, and dying 
without any religion. I know some think religion 
is rather uncomfortable to live by, but the worst of 
men, as the best, thinks it is a good thing to die 
with. Men repent of many things on a death-bed ; 



190 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

when the storm blows, all the dead bodies are 
stirred in the bosom of the sea, but no one is then 
sorry for his efforts to become a religious man. 
Many a man, who lives in the violation of his 
personal, domestic, social, national, and general 
human duties, doubtless contrives to think he is a 
religious man, and if in the name of Mammon 
he robs the widow of a pound, he gives a penny 
to the orphan in the name of God, and thinks he 
serves each without much offending the other. 
Thus, kidnappers in these times are " exemplary 
members" of "Christian churches " where philan- 
thropy gets roundly rated by the minister from 
week to week, and call themselves " miserable of- 
fenders " with the devoutest air. This is not all 
sham. The men want to keep on good terms with 
God, and take this as the cheapest, as well as the 
most respectable way. Louis the Fifteenth had a 
private chapel dedicated to the "Blessed Virgin" 
in the midst of his house of debauchery, where he 
and his poor victims were said to be " very devout 
after the Church fashion." Slave-traders and 
kidnappers take pains to repel all calumny from 
their "religious" reputation, and do not practise 
their craft till " divines " assure them it is patri- 
archal and even " Christian." I mention these 
things to show that men who are commonly thought 
eminently atrocious in their conduct and character, 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 191 



yet would not willingly be without religion. I 
shall take it for granted that all men wish to ac- 
quire a religious character. 

I take it this is the Idea of a religious character. 
It is, first, to be faithful to ourselves, to rule body 
and spirit, each by the natural law thereof; to use, 
develop, and enjoy all the faculties, each in its 
just proportions, all in harmonious action, devel- 
oped to the greatest degree that is possible under 
our circumstances ; to have such an abiding con- 
sciousness of God, that you will have the fourfold 
form of piety, so often dwelt on before, and be 
inwardly blameless, harmonious, and holy. 

It is, next, to be faithful to your fellow-men ; to 
do for them what is right, from right motives and 
for right ends ; to love them as yourself; to be use- 
ful to them to the extent of your power ; to live in 
such harmony with them that you shall rejoice in 
their joys, and all be mutually blessed with the 
bliss of each other. 

It is also to be faithful to God; to know of 
Him, to have a realizing sense of his Infinite 
power, wisdom, justice, goodness, and holiness, 
and so a perfect love of God, a perfect trust in 
Him, a delight in the Infinite Being of God ; to 
love him intellectually in the love of truth, moral- 
ly as justice, affectionally as love, and totally as 



192 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

the Infinite God, Father and Mother too of all 
this world; so to love God that you have no de- 
sire to transcend his law or violate your duty to 
yourself, your brother, or your God ; so to love 
Him that there shall be no fear of God, none for 
yourself, none for mankind, but a perfect confi- 
dence and an absolute love shall take the place of 
every fear. In short, it is to serve God by the 
normal use, development, and enjoyment of every 
faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, and 
every mode of power which we possess. 

I think that is the ideal of a religious charac- 
ter ; that there is no one who would not confess a 
desire to be religious in that sense, for it is to be a 
perfect man ; no one who would not make some 
sacrifice for this end ; most men would make a 
great one, some would leave father and mother, 
and lay down their own lives, to secure it. 

"What are some of the means to this end, to 
this grace and this glory? There are four great 
public educational forces, namely, the industrial, 
political, literary, and ecclesiastical action of the 
people, represented by the Business, the State, the 
Press, and the Church* These have a general 

* See Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, by Theo- 
dore Parker, Boston, 1852, Yol. I. p. 407 et seq., where these educa- 
tional forces are dwelt on at length. 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 193 

influence in the formation of the character, and so 
a special influence in the formation of the religious 
character; but as they cannot be trusted for the 
general work of forming the character, no more can 
they for this special function. They are less reliable 
in religion than in any other matter whatever. By 
these forces the whole community is a teacher of 
religion to all persons born therein ; but it can 
only teach the mode and degree of religion it has 
itself learned and possessed, not that which it has 
not learned and does not possess. Not only can 
it not teach a religion higher than its own, but it 
hinders you in your attempt to learn a new and 
better mode of religion. 

For several things we may trust these public 
educational forces in religion. 

They will teach you in general the popular fear 
of God, and a certain outward reverence which 
comes of that ; the popular sacraments of our time, 
— to give your bodily presence in a meeting-house, 
perhaps to join a sectarian church, and profess 
great reverence for the Bible. 

They will teach you the popular part of your 
practical duties, — personal, domestic, social, ec- 
clesiastical, and political. But of course they can 
teach you only the popular part. 

They may be relied on to teach the majority of 
men certain great truths, which are the common 
17 



194 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS 



property of Christendom, such as the existence of 
a God, the immortality of the soul, the certainty of 
a kind of retribution, and the like. Then each sect 
has certain truths of its own -which it will com- 
monly teach. Thus, the Catholics will learn to 
reverence the Roman Church ; the Protestants to 
venerate the Bible ; the Calvinists to believe in 
the Trinity; and the Unitarians in the Oneness of 
God. All the sects will teach a certain decorum, 
the observance of Sunday. — to honor the popular 
virtues, to shun the unpopular vices. 

The educational forces tend to produce this ef- 
fect. You send your boys to the public schools of 
Boston, they learn the disciplines taught there, — 
to read, write, and calculate. What is not taught 
they do not learn. In Saxony the children learn 
German ; Dutch, in Holland. In the same way 
the majority of men learn the common religion of 
the community, and profess it practically in their 
markets, their houses, their halls of legislature, their 
courts, and their jails. The commercial newspa- 
pers, the proceedings of Congress, the speeches of 
public men, — these are a part of the national pro- 
fession of faith, and show what is the actual ob- 
ject of worship, and what the practical creed of 
the nation. 

But for any eminence of religion you must 
look elsewhere ; for any excellence of the senti- 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 195 

ment, any superiority of the idea, any newness in 
the form of religion. These educational forces 
will teach you evanescent principles which seem 
to suit your present and partial interests, not eter- 
nal principles, which really suit your universal and 
everlasting interests. In Jerusalem these forces 
might educate a Gamaliel, — never a Jesus. 

Charles River flows two miles an hour ; chips 
and straws on its surface, therefore, if there be no 
wind, will float with that velocity. But if a man 
in a boat wishes to go ten miles an hour, he must 
row eight miles more than the stream will carry 
him. So we are all in the dull current of the 
popular religion, and may trust it to drift us as 
fast as it flows itself ; we may rise with its flood, 
and be stranded and left dry when it ebbs out 
before some popular wickedness which blows from 
off the shore. The religious educational forces of 
a commercial town, — you see in the newspapers 
what religion they will teach you, — in the streets 
what men they would make. 

These educational forces tend to make average 
Christians, and their influence is of great value to 
the community, — like the discipline of a camp* 
But to be eminent religious men, you must de- 
pend on very different helps. Let us look at some 
of them. 



196 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



There are religious men who, by the religious 
genius they were born to, and the religious use 
they have made thereof, have risen far above the 
average of Christians. Such men are the first 
help; and a most important one they are. It is 
a fortunate thing when such an one stands in a 
church whither the public current drives in the 
people, and to the strength of his nature adds the 
strength of position. But it is not often that such 
a man gets into a pulpit. The common ecclesias- 
tical training tends to produce dull and ordinary 
men, with little individual life, little zeal, and only 
the inspiration of a sect. However, if a man of 
religious genius, by some human accident, gets 
into a pulpit, he is in great danger of preaching 
himself out of it. Still there are such men. a few 
of them, stationed along the line of the human 
march ; cities set on a hill, which no cloud of oblo- 
quy can wholly hide from sight. Nay, they are 
great beacons on the shore of the world, — light- 
houses on the headlands of the coast, sending their 
guidance far out to sea, to warn the mariner of 
his whereabouts, and welcome him to port and 
peace. Street-lamps there must be for the thor- 
oughfares of the town, shop-lights also for the 
grocer and the apothecary ; and numerous they 
will ever be, each having its own function. This 
arrangement takes place in the ecclesiastical as 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 197 

well as in municipal affairs, for each sect has its 
street-lamps and its shop-lights to guide men to 
its particular huckstery of salvation, where the 
salesmen and the showmen are all ready with their 
wares. But the great Faros of Genoa, and Ed- 
dystone lighthouses of religion must always be 
few and far between ; the world is not yet rich 
enough in spirit to afford many of this sort. Yet 
these men are still 

" The genius of the shore 
In their large recompense,, and shall do good 
To all that wander in that perilous flood." 

But even in these men you seldom find the 
wholeness of religion. One has the sentiments 
thereof; he will kindle your religious feelings, your 
reverence, your devotion, your trust, and your love 
of God. 

Another has only its ideas ; new T thoughts about 
religion, new truths, which he presents to the minds 
of men. Analytic, he destroys the ancient errors 
of theological systems ; thrashes the creeds of the 
churches with the stout flail of philosophy, and 
sifts them as wheat, winnowing with a rough 
wind, great clouds of chaff blow off before his 
mighty vans. Synthetic, he takes the old truth 
which stood the critical thrashing and is now win- 
nowed clean; he joins therewith new truth shot 
down from God, and welcomed into loving arms ; 
17* 



198 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



and out of his large storehouse this scribe, well 
instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, brings 
forth things new and old, to serve as bread for 
the living, and seed-corn to generations not born 
as yet. 

A third, with no eminence of feelings common- 
ly called religious, — none of theological ideas, — 
will have yet an eminence of justice, and teach 
personal and social morality as no other man. 
He may turn to a single speciality of morals, and 
demand temperance, chastity, the reform of penal 
law, the reconstruction of society, the elevation of 
woman, and the education of the whole mass of 
men ; or he may turn to general philanthropy, the 
universality of moral excellence, — it all comes 
from the same root, and with grateful welcome 
should be received. 

Each of these teachers will do real service to 
your souls, — quickening the feelings, imparting 
ideas, and organizing the results of religion in 
moral acts. I know a great outcry has been made 
in all the churches against moral reformers, against 
men w r ho would apply pure religion to common 
life, in the special or the universal form. You all 
know what clamor is always raised against a man 
who would abolish a vice from human society, or 
establish a new virtue. Every wolf is interested 
in the wilderness, and hates the axe and the plough 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 199 

of the settler, and would devour his child if he 
dared. So every nuisance in society has its sup- 
porters, whose property is invested therein. Paul 
found it so at Ephesus, Telemachus at Rome, and 
Garrison in America. I doubt not the men of 
Ephesus thought religion good in all matters except 
the making of silver shrines for Diana ; " there it 
makes men mad." Men cry out against the ad- 
vance of morality : " Preach us religion ; preach 
us Christianity, Christ and him crucified, and not 
this infidel matter of ending particular sins, and 
abounding in special virtues. Preach us the ex- 
ceeding sinfulness of sin, the beauty of holiness, 
and the like of that, and let alone the actual sins 
of society, of the shop and the church and the 
state; — be silent about drunkenness and lust, 
about war, slavery, and the thousand forms of 
avarice which we rejoice in. Is it not enough, 
O Preacher, that we give you of our purse and 
our corporeal presence, that we weekly confess 
ourselves ' miserable offenders,' with ' no health 
in us,' and fast, perhaps, twice in our lives, but 
you must convict us of being idolaters also ; yea, 
drunkards, gluttons, impure in youth and avari- 
cious in manhood, — once a Voluptuary, and now 
a Hunker! Go to now, and preach us the blessed- 
ness of the righteous, Christ and him crucified ! " 
"When money speaks, the Church obeys, and the 



200 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



pulpit preaches for doctrine the commandments of 
the pews. 

But it is these very moral reformers who, in our 
time, have done more than all others to promote 
the feeling of piety which the churches profess so 
much to covet. The new ground of religion which 
the churches occupy is always won for them by 
men whom the churches hated. In the last thirty 
years these hated moral reformers of New Eng- 
land, I think, have done more to promote love of 
God, and faith in Him, than all the other preach- 
ers of all the churches. Justice is a part of piety; 
and such is the instinctive love of wholeness in 
man, that all attempts to promote justice amongst 
men lead ultimately to the love of God as God. 

In every community you will find a man who 
thus represents some portion of religion, — often, 
perhaps, thinking that part is the whole, because 
it is all that he knows; here and there we find 
such an one in the pulpit. But now and then 
there comes a man who unites these three func- 
tions of piety into one great glory of religion ; is 
eminent in feelings, ideas, and actions not the less. 
Each of those partial men may help us much, 
teaching his doctrine, kindling our feelings, giving 
example of his deed, and laying out religious work 
for us, spreading his pattern before society. Each 
of these may help us to a partial improvement. 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 201 



But when a man comes who unites them all, he 
will give us a new start, an inspiration which no 
other man can give ; not partial, but total. 

There are always some such men in the world ; 
the seed of the prophets never dies out. It comes 
up in Israel and in Attica; here a prophet teach- 
ing truth as divine inspiration, there a philoso- 
pher with his human discovery. So the Herb of 
Grace springs up in corners where once old houses 
stood, or wherever the winds have borne the seed ; 
and, cropped by the oxen, and trodden with their 
feet, it grows ever fresh and ever new. When 
Scribes and Pharisees become idolaters at Jerusa- 
lem, and the sheep without a shepherd 

" Look up and are not fed, 
But, swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread," — 

the spirit of God comes newly down on some 
carpenter's son at Nazareth, whose lightning ter- 
rifies the non-conducting Scribe ; the new encoun- 
ters the perishable old, and all heaven rings with 
the thunder of the collision. Now and then such 
a person comes to stand betwixt the living and 
the dead. " Bury that," quoth he, " it is hopelessly 
dead, past all resurrection. This must be healed, 
tended, and made whole." He is a physician to 
churches sick of sin, as well as with it; burying 
the dead, he heals also the sick, and quickens the 



202 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



sound into new and healthy life. But the own- 
ers of swine that perish must needs cry out at 
the loss. 

Yet such a man is not understood in his own 
generation. A man with a single eminent facul- 
ty is soon seen through and comprehended. This 
man is good for nothing but practice ; that, only 
for thought. One is a sentimentalist ; another, 
a traveller. But when a man comes eminent in 
many and most heterogeneous faculties, men do 
not see through nor comprehend him in a short 
time. If he has in himself all the eminence of 
all the men in the metropolis, — why, it will take 
many a great city to comprehend him. The young 
maiden in the story, for the first time hearing her 
clerical lover preach, wondered that those lips 
could pray as sweetly as they kissed, but could not 
comprehend the twofold sacrament, the mystery of 
this double function of a single mouth. Any body 
can see that corn grows in this field, and kale in 
that ; the roughest clown knows this, but it takes 
a great many great men to describe the botany of 
a whole continent. So is it ever. Here is a relig- 
ious man, — writing on purely internal emotions 
of piety, of love of God, of faith in Him, of rest for 
the soul, the foretaste of heaven. He penetrates 
the deeps of religious joy, its peace enters his soul, 
his morning prayer is a psalm deeper than Da- 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 203 



vid's, with a beauty more various than the poetic 
wreath which the shepherd-king gathered from the 
hill-sides of Jordan or the gardens of Mount Zion. 
Straightway men say : " This man is a sentimen- 
talist ; he is a mystic, all contemplation, all feel- 
ing, — poetical, dreamy, — his light is moonshine." 
But ere long our sentimentalist writes of philos- 
ophy, and his keen eye sees mines of wisdom not 
quarried heretofore, and he brings a power of un- 
sunned gold to light. Other men say: " O, this 
man is nothing but a philosopher, a mere thinker, 
a mighty head, but with no more heart than Chim- 
borazo or Thomas Hobbes." Yet presently some 
great sin breaks out, and rolls its desolating flood 
over the land, uprooting field and town, and our 
philosopher goes out to resist the ruin. He de- 
nounces the evil, attacks the institution which thus 
deceives men. Straightway men call out : " Icono- 
clast! Boanerges! John Knox ! destroyer!" and the 
like. Alas me! men do not know that the same 
sun gathers the dews which water the forget-me- 
not, drooping at noonday, and drives through the 
sky the irresistible storm that shatters the forest 
in its thunderous march, and piles the ruins of a 
mountain in an Alpine avalanche. The same soul 
which thundered its forked lightning on Scribes 
and Pharisees, hypocrites, poured out poetic para- 
bles from his golden urn, spread out the sunshine 



204 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



of the beatitudes upon friend and foe, and. half 
in heaven, breathed language wholly thence, — 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." 

It is a great thing once in our days to meet 
with a man of religious genius largely developed 
into lovely life. He stirs the feelings infinite within 
us, and we go off quite other than we came. He has 
not put his soul into our bosom ; he has done bet- 
ter, — has waked our soul in our own bosom. Men 
may go leagues long to listen to such a man, and 
come back well paid. He gives us seeds of future 
life for our little garden. So the husbandman 
journeys far to get a new root or a new seed, to 
fill his ground with beauty or his home with bread. 
After we have listened to the life of such a man, 
the world does not seem so low, nor man so mean ; 
heaven looks nearer, yet higher too ; humanity is 
more rich ; if wrong appear yet more shameful, the 
wrongdoer is not so hopeless. After that I can 
endure trouble ; my constant cross is not so heavy; 
the unwonted is less difficult to bear. Tears are 
not so scalding to an eye which has looked through 
them on a great-souled man. Men seem friend- 
lier, and God is exceeding dear. The magistrates 
of Jerusalem marvelled at the conduct of Peter 
and John, heedful of the higher law of God, spite 
of bonds and imprisonment and politicians ; but 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS, 205 

they " took knowledge of them, that they had been 
with Jesus," and the marvel had its explanation. 
What a dull, stupid thing is a candle! Touch it 
with fire, and then look ! We are all of us capa- 
ble of being lit when some Prometheus comes 
down with the spark of God in his right hand. 
The word of Jesus touched the fishermen of Gal- 
ilee, and they flamed into martyrs and apostles. 

It is a great thing to meet such a man once in 
your lifetime, to be cheered and comforted in your 
sad wayfaring, and filled with new vigor and new 
faith in God. After that we thank God, and take 
courage and fare on our happier way. So a com- 
pany of pilgrims journeying in the wilderness, dry, 
foot-sore, and hot, the water all spent in their goat- 
skins, their camels weary and sick, come to a grove 
of twelve palm-trees, and an unexpected spring 
of pure water wells up in the desert. Straight- 
way their weariness is all forgot, their limping 
camels have become whole once more. Staying 
their thirst, they fill their bottles also with the cool 
refreshment, rest in the shadow from the noon- 
day's heat, and then with freshened life, the sore- 
ness gone from every bone, pursue their noiseless 
and their happy march. Even so, says the Old 
Testament story, God sent his angel down in the 
wilderness to feed Elias with the bread of heaven, 
and in the strength thereof the prophet went his 

18 



206 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS, 

forty days, nor hungered not. I suppose some of 
us have have had this experience, and in our time 
of bewilderment, of scorching desolation, and of 
sorrow, have come upon our well of water and 
twelve palm-trees In the sand, and so have marched 
all joyful through the wilderness. Elias left all 
the angels of God for you and me, — the friendlier 
for his acquaintance. 

There is a continual need of men of this stamp. 
We live in the midst of religious machinery. 
Many mechanics at piety, often only apprentices 
and slow to learn, are turning the various ecclesi- 
astical mills, and the creak of the motion is thought 
" the voice of God." You put into the hopper a 
crowd of persons, young and old, and soon they 
are ground out into the common run of Chris- 
tians, sacked up, and stored away for safe-keeping 
in the appropriate bins of the great ecclesiastical 
establishment, and labelled with their party names. 
You look about in what is dryly called " the relig- 
ious world." What a mass of machinery is there, 
of dead timber, not green trees! what a jar and 
discord of iron clattering upon iron ! Action is of 
machinery, not of life, and it is green new life that 
you want. So men grow dull in their churches. 
What a weariness is an ordinary meeting on one 
of the fifty-two ordinary Sundays of the year! 
What a dreary thing is an ordinary sermon of an 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 207 

ordinary minister! He does not wish to preach 
it; the audience does not wish to hear it. So 
he makes a feint of preaching, they a feint of 
hearing him preach. But he preaches not; they 
hear not. He is dull as the cushion he beats, 
they as the cushions they cover. A body of men 
met in a church for nothing, and about nothing, 
and to hear nobody, is to me a ghastly spectacle. 
Did you ever see cattle in a cold day in the coun- 
try crowd together in an inclosure, the ground 
frozen under their feet, and no hay spread upon 
it, — huddling together for warmth, hungry, but in- 
active, because penned up, and waiting with the 
heavy, slumberous patience of oxen till some man 
should come and shake down to them a truss of 
clean bright hay, still redolent with clover and 
honeysuckle? That is a cheerful sight; and when 
the farmer comes and hews their winter food out 
of the stack, what life is in these slumberous oxen ! 
their venerable eyes are full of light, because they 
see their food. Ah me ! how many a herd of men 
is stall-hungered in the churches, not getting even 
the hay of religion, only a little chaff swept off 
from old thrashing-floors whence the corn which 
great men beat out of its husk was gathered up 
to feed and bless mankind! Churches are built 
of stone. I have often thought pulpits should be 
cushioned with husks, 



208 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



Of all melancholy social sights that one sees, 
few are so sad as a body of men got together to 
convert mankind to sectarianism by ecclesiastical 
machinery, — men dead as timber, cut down dead 
and dry ! Out of wire, muslin, thread, starch, gum, 
and sundry chemicals, French milliners make by 
dozens what they call roses, lilies of the valley, 
forget-me-nots, and the like. Scentless and seedless 
abortions are they, and no more. What a difference 
between the flower the lover gathers by the brook- 
side for his maiden's breast, and the thing which 
the milliner makes with her scissors ; between the 
forget-me-not of the meadow and the forget-me- 
not of the shop ! Such an odds is there betwixt re- 
ligious men and Christians manufactured in a mill. 

In the factories of England you find men busy 
all their life in making each the twenty-sixth part 
of a watch. They can do nothing else, and be- 
come almost as much machines as the grindstone 
which sharpens their drill, or the rammage which 
carries their file. Much of our ecclesiastical ma- 
chinery tends to make men into mere fixtures in a 
mill. So there must be a continual accession of 
new religious life from without into the churches 
to keep Christians living. Men of religious genius 
it is who bring it in. Without them "religion" 
in cities would become mere traditional theology, 
and " life in God " would be sitting in a meeting- 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 209 

house, and the baptism in water from an aque- 
duct taken for the communion of the Holy Ghost. 
Blessed be God that there are such men not 
smothered in the surplice of the priest, but still 
alive in God, and God alive in them ! 

In old towns all the water that fills the wells is 
dead water, — dead and dirty too ; the rinsings 
of the streets, the soakings of stables, the slop of 
markets, the wash and offscouring of the town ; 
even the filterings of the grave-yard settle therein, 
and the child is fed with its grandsire's bones. 
Men would perish if left alone, dying of their drink. 
So, far off in the hills, above the level of the town, 
they seek some mountain lake, and furnish a path- 
way that its crystal beauty may come to town. 
There the living water leaps up in public foun- 
tains, it washes the streets, it satisfies the blame- 
less cattle, it runs into every house to cleanse and 
purify and bless, and men are glad as the Hebrews 
when Moses smote the fabled rock. So comes 
religious genius unto men: some mountain of a 
man stands up tall, and all winter long takes the 
snows of heaven on his shoulders, all summer 
through receives the cold rain into his bosom ; both 
become springs of living water at his feet. Then the 
proprietors of fetid wells and subterranean tanks, 
which they call " Bethesda," though often troubled 
by other than angels, and whence they retail their 

18* 



210 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS 



" salvation "' a pennyworth at a time, — they cry out 
with sneer and scoff and scorn against our new- 
born saint. K Shall Christ come out of Galilee ? n 
quoth they. ,; Art thou greater than our father 
Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank thereof 
himself, and his children, and his cattle ? Who 
are you ? n Thus, the man of forms has ever his 
calumny against the man of God. 

Religious teachers there will ever be. — a few 
organizers, many an administrator of organizations ; 
but inventors in religion are always few. These 
are the greatest external helps to the manhood of 
religion. All great teaching is the teachers in- 
spiration ; this is truer in religion than in aught 
besides, for here all is life, and nothing a trick of 
mechanism. Let us take all the good that we 
can gain from the rare men of religious genius, 
but never submit and make even them our lords : 
teachers ever, let them never be masters. 

Then there are religious books, such as waken 
the soul by their direct action, — stirring us to piety, 
stirring us to morality, — books in which men of 
great religious growth have garnered up the expe- 
rience of their life. Some of them are total, — for all 
religion; some partial, — for the several specialities 
thereof. These books are sacks of corn earned 
from land to land, to be sown, and bear manifold 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 211 



their golden fruit. There are not many such in 
the world. There are few masterpieces of poetry 
in all the earth ; a boy's school-bag would hold 
them all, from Greece and Rome, Italy, Germany, 
England. The masterpieces of piety in literature 
are the rarest of all. In a mineralogist's cabinet 
what bushels there are of quartz, mica, hornblende, 
slate, and coal; and common minerals by heaps; 
reptiles and fishes done in stone; only here and 
there an emerald ; and diamonds are exceeding 
rare. So is it with gems of holy thought. Some 
psalms are there from the Bible, though seldom a 
whole one that is true to the soul of man, — now 
and then an oracle from a Hebrew prophet, full of 
faith in God, a warrior of piety, — which keep their 
place in the cabinet of religion, though two or 
three thousand years have passed by since their 
authors ceased to be mortal. But the most quick- 
ening of all religious literature is still found in the 
first three Gospels of the New Testament, — in 
those dear beatitudes, in occasional flowers of re- 
ligion, — parable and speech. The beatitudes will 
outlast the pyramids. Yet the New Testament 
and its choicest texts must be read with the cau- 
tion of a free-born man. Even in the words of 
Jesus Christ much is merely Hebrew, — marked 
with the limitations of the nation and the man. 
Other religious books there are precious to the 



212 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



heart of man. Some of the works of Augus- 
tine, of Thomas a Kempis, of Fenelon, of Jeremy- 
Taylor, of John Bunyan, of William Law, have 
proved exceeding dear to pious men throughout 
the Christian world. In a much narrower circle 
of readers, Buckminster, Channing, and Ware 
have comforted the souls of men. Herbert and 
Watts have here and there a " gem of purest ray- 
serene," and now and then a flower blooms into 
beauty in the desert air of liturgies, breviaries, and 
collections of hymns. The religious influence of 
Wordsworth's poetry has been truly great. With 
no large poetic genius, often hemmed in by the 
narrowness of his traditionary creed and the pue- 
rile littleness of men about him, he had yet an ex- 
ceeding love of God, which ran over into love of 
men, and beautified his everyday; and many a 
poor girl, many a sad boy, has been cheered and 
lifted up in soul and sense by the brave piety in 
his sonnets and in his lyric sweeps of lofty song. 
A writer of our own time, with large genius and 
unfaltering piety, adorning a little village of New 
England with his fragrant life, has sent a great 
religious influence to many a house in field and 
town, and youths and maids rejoice in his electric 
touch. I will leave it to posterity to name his 
name, — the most original, as well as religious, of 
American writers. 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 213 

But the great vice of what is called " religious 
literature " is this. It is the work of narrow- 
minded men, sectarians, and often bigots, who 
cannot see beyond their own little partisan chapel ; 
men who know little of any thing, less of man, and 
least of all of real religion. What criticism do 
such men make on noble men ? The criticism 
of an oyster on a thrush ; nay, sometimes, of a 
toad "ugly and venomous," with no "jewel in 
its head," upon a nightingale. Literature of that 
character is a curse. In the name of God it mis- 
leads common men from religion, and it makes 
powerful men hate religion itself; at least hate 
its name. It bows weak men down till they trem- 
ble and fear all their mortal life. I lack words to 
express my detestation of this trash, — concocted 
of sectarian cant and superstitious fear. I trem- 
ble when I think of the darkness it spreads over 
human life, of the disease which it inoculates man- 
kind withal, and the craven dread it writes out upon 
the face of its worshippers. Look at the history of 
the Athanasian Creed and the Westminster Cate- 
chism. They have done more, it seems to me, to 
retard the religious development of Christendom, 
than all the ribald works of confessed infidels, from 
Lucian, the king of scoffers, down to our own days. 
The American Tract Society, with the best inten- 
tions in the world, it seems to me is doing more 



214 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

damage to the nation than all the sellers of intoxi- 
cating drink and all the prostitutes in the land ! 

Some books on religious matters are the work 
of able men, men well disciplined, but yet con- 
taminated with false views of God, of man, and of 
the relation between the two ; with false views of 
life, of death, and of the next, eternal world. Such 
men were Baxter and Edwards and many more, 
— Protestant and Catholic, Christian, Hebrew, 
Buddhist, and Mahometan. All these books should 
be read with caution and distrust. Still a wise 
man, with a religious spirit, in the religious litera- 
ture of the world, from Confucius to Emerson, 
may find much to help his growth. 

After the attainment of manlier years in piety, 
other works, not intentionally religious, will help a 
man greatly. Books of science, which show the 
thought of God writ in the world of matter; books 
of history, which reveal the same mind in the de- 
velopment of the human race, slow, but as constant 
and as normal as the growth of a cedar or the dis- 
closing of an egg; Newton and Laplace, Descartes 
and Kant, indirectly, through their science, stir de- 
vout souls to deeper devotion. A thoughtful man 
dissolves the matter of the universe, leaving only 
its forces; dissolves away the phenomena of hu- 
man history, leaving only immortal spirit ; he stud- 
ies the law, the mode of action, of these forces. 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 215 



and this spirit, which make up the material and 
the human world ; and I see not how he can fail 
to be filled with reverence, with trust, with bound- 
less love of the Infinite God who devised these 
laws of matter and of mind, and thereby bears 
up this marvellous universe of things and men. 
Science also has its New Testament. The beati- 
tudes of philosophy are profoundly touching; in 
the exact laws of matter and of mind the great 
Author of the world continually says, " Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest." 

The study of nature is another great help to the 
cultivation of religion. Familiarity with the grass 
and the trees teaches us deeper lessons of love 
and trust than we can learn from the writings of 
Fenelon and Augustine. What lessons did Soc- 
rates, Jesus, and Luther learn from the great Bible 
of God, ever open before mankind! It is only in- 
directly that He speaks in the sights of a city, — 
the brick garden with dioecious fops for flowers. 
But in the country all is full of God, and the 
eternal flowers of heaven seem to shed sweet in- 
fluence on the perishable blossoms of the earth. 
Nature is full of religious lessons to a thoughtful 
man. The great sermon of Jesus was preached 
on a mountain, which preached to him as he to 



216 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

the people, and his figures of speech were first 
natural figures of fact. But the religious use to 
be made of natural objects would require a ser- 
mon for itself. 

The great reliance for religious growth must 
not be on any thing external; not on the great 
and living souls whom God sends, rarely, to the 
earth, to water the dry ground with their eloquence, 
and warm it with their human love ; nor must it 
be on the choicest gems of religious thought, where- 
in saints and sages have garnered up their life 
and left it for us. We cannot rely on the beauty 
or the power of outward nature to charm our wan- 
dering soul to obedience and trust in God. These 
things may jostle us by the elbow when we read, 
warn us of wandering, or of sloth, and open the 
gate, but we must rely on ourselves for entering 
in. By the aid of others and our own action we 
must form the ideal of a religious man, of what 
he ought to be and do, under our peculiar circum- 
stances. To form this personal ideal, and fit our- 
selves thereto, requires an act of great earnestness 
on our part. It is not a thing to be done in an 
idle hour. It demands the greatest activity of the 
mightiest mode of mind. But what a difference 
there is between men in earnestness of character! 
Do you understand the " religion " of a frivolous 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 217 

man ? With him it is all frivolity ; the fashion of 
his religion is of less concern than the fashion of 
his hat or of the latchetr of his shoes. He asks 
not for truth, for justice, for love, — asks not for 
God, cares not. The great sacrament of religious 
life is to him less valuable than a flask of Rhenish 
wine broke on a jesters head. The specific levity 
of these men appears in their relation to religion. 
The fool hath said in his heart, " There is no 
God." Quoth the fop in his waistcoat, M What 
if there be none? What is that to me? Let us 
dance and be silly ! " Did you ever see a frivolous 
man and maid in love, — so they called it? I 
have : it was like putting on a new garment of 
uncertain fit ; and the giving and the taking of 
what was called a "heart" was like buying a 
quantity of poison weed to turn to empty smoke. 
So have I seen a silly man give a bad coin to a 
beggar in the streets. 

I know there are those whose practical religion 
is only decency. They have no experience of re- 
ligion, but the hiring of a seat in a church where 
pew and pulpit both invite to sleep, — -whose only 
sacrifice is their pew-tax ; their single sacrament but 
bodily presence in a church. There are churches 
full of such men, which ecclesiastical upholsterers 
have furnished with pulpit, and pew, and priest, 
objects of pity to men with human hearts! 

19 



218 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

When an earnest young man offers a woman 
his heart and his life and his love, asking her for 
her heart and her life and her love, it is no easy- 
hour to man or maid. The thought of it takes 
the rose out of the young cheek, gives a new lustre 
to the eye that has a deeper and mysterious look, 
and a terrible throbbing to the heart. For so 
much depends upon a word that forms or else 
misshapes so much in life, and soul and sense are 
clamoring for their right. The past comes up to 
help create the future, and all creation is new 
before the lover's eye, and all 

" The floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." 

So is it in some great hour when an earnest 
man holds communion with himself, seeking to 
give and take with God, and asks : " What ought 
I in my life to be and do ? " Depend upon it, only 
to the vulgarest of men is it a common hour. I 
will not say that every earnest man has his one 
enamored hour of betrothing himself to religion. 
Some have this sudden experience, and give them- 
selves to piety as they espouse a bride found when 
not looked for, and welcomed with a great swell- 
ing of the heart and prophetic bloomings of the 
yearning soul. Others go hand in hand therewith 
as brother and sister, through all their early days 
in amiable amity which sin has hardly broke and 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 219 

seldom jarred ; and so the wedlock of religion is 
as the acquaintance which began in our babyhood, 
was friendship next at home and school, and slow- 
ly under tranquil skies grew up and blossomed out 
at last to love. This is the common way, — an 
ascent without a sudden leap. If bred as religious 
children, you grow up religious men. But under 
the easiest of discipline, I think, every earnest man 
has his time of trial and of question, when he 
asks himself, " Shall I serve the soul by a life of 
piety ; or shall I only serve the flesh, listing in 
the popular armada of worldliness to do battle in 
that leprous host? That, I say, is a time of trial. 

Let us suppose some earnest man forms the 
true ideal of religion, — of his duty to himself, his 
brother, and his God. He is next to observe and 
attend to himself, making his prayer a practice, 
and his ideal dream an actual day of life. Here 
he is to watch and scan himself, to see what causes 
help, and what hinder him in his religious growth. 
We have different dispositions, all of us ; what 
tempts one, is nothing to another man; every heart 
knows only its own bitterness, not also that of 
another. Let me know my weak points and my 
strong ones ; forewarned, I shall be then forearmed. 
This man in the period of passion is led off by the 
lusts of the body ; that in the period of calculation 



220 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



is brought into yet greater peril by his ambition, — 
his love of riches, place, and the respect of men. 
The Devil rings a dollar in one man's ear; he dreams 
of money every day. Some sensual lust catches 
another, as flies with poisoned sweet. To speak 
mythologically, the Devil has different baits to lure 
his diverse prey. Love of applause strips this 
man of his conscience, his affection, and his self- 
respect, of his regard for God, and drives him naked 
through a dirty world. Let a man know in what 
guise the tempter comes, and when, and he will 
not suffer his honor to be broken through. For 
this purpose, in the earlier period of life, or later 
when placed in positions of new peril, it is well to 
ask at the close of every day, " What have I done 
that is wrong, — what have I said, or thought, or 
felt? What that is right ? " It is well thus to orient 
yourself before your Idea and your God, and see 
if there be any evil thing in you. This is needful 
until the man has got complete possession of every 
limb of his body and of each faculty of his spirit, 
and can use them each after its own law in his 
particular position. Then he will do right with 
as little trouble as he walks about his daily work. 
His life will sanctify itself. 

Do you know how artists make their great pic- 
tures ? First, they form the idea. It is a work of 
sweat and watching. The man assembles all the 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 221 

shapes of beauty and of power which he has ever 
seen, or thought, or fancied, or felt. They flash along 
before his quickened eye, wildered and wandering 
now. New forms of beauty spring into life at the 
bidding of his imagination, — so flowers at touch 
of spring. Ere long he has his idea, composite, 
gathered from many a form of partial beauty, and 
yet one ; a new creation never seen before. Thus 
in his seething mind Phidias smelts the several 
beauty of five hundred Spartan maids into his one 
Pallas- Athena, born of his head this time, a grand 
eclecticism of loveliness. So Michael devised his 
awful form of God creating in the Vatican ; and 
Raphael his dear Cecilia, sweetest of pictured 
saints, — so fair, she drew the angels down to see 
her sing, and ears were turned to eyes. Now the 
artist has formed his idea. But that is not all. 
Next, he must make the idea that is in his mind 
a picture in the eyes of men ; his personal fiction 
must become a popular fact. So he toils over 
this new work for many a weary day, and week, 
and month, and year, with penitential brush oft 
painting out what once amiss he painted in, — for 
even art has its error, the painter's sin, and so its 
remorse ; the artist is made wiser by his own defeat. 
At last his work stands there complete, — the holy 
queen of art. Genius is the father, of a heavenly 
line ; but the mortal mother, that is Industry. 

19* 



222 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



Now as an artist, like Phidias, Angelo, or Ra- 
phael, must hold a great act of imagination to 
form his idea, and then industriously toil, often 
wiping out in remorse what he drew in passion or 
in ignorance ; so the man who would be relig- 
ious must hold his creative act of prayer, to set 
the great example to himself, and then industri- 
ously toil to make it daily life, shaping his actual, 
not from the chance of circumstance, but from the 
ideal purpose of his soul. 

There is no great growth in manly piety with- 
out fire to conceive, and then painstaking to re- 
produce the idea, — without the act of prayer, the 
act of industry. The act of prayer, — that is the 
one great vital means of religious growth ; the res- 
olute desire and the unconquerable will to be the 
image of a perfect man ; the comparison of your 
actual day with your ideal dream ; the rising forth, 
borne up on mighty pens, to fly towards the far 
heaven of religious joy. Fast as you learn a truth, 
moral, affectional, or religious, apply the special 
truth to daily life, and you increase your piety. 
So the best school for religion is the daily work 
of common life, with its daily discipline of person- 
al, domestic, and social duties, — the daily work in 
field or shop, market or house, " the charities that 
soothe and heal and bless." 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 223 

Nothing great is ever done without industry. 
Sloth sinks the idle boy to stupid ignorance, and 
vain to him are schools, and books, and all the 
appliances of the instructor's art. It is industry in 
religion which makes the man a saint. What 
zeal is there for money, — what diligence in learn- 
ing to be a lawyer, a fiddler, or a smith ! The 
same industry to be also religious men, — what 
noble images of God it would make us ! ay, what 
blessed men. Even in the special qualities of fid- 
dler, lawyer, smith, we should be more ; for general 
manhood is the stuff we make into tradesmen of 
each special craft, and the gold which was fine in 
the ingot is fine also in the medal and the coin. 

You have seen a skilful gardener about his work. 
He saves the slips of his pear-trees, prunings from 
his currant-bush; he watches for the sunny hours 
in spring to air his passion-flower and orange-tree. 
How nicely he shields his dahlias from the wind, 
his melons from the frost ! Patiently he hoards cut- 
tings from a rose-bush, and the stone of a peach ; 
choice fruit in another's orchard next year is graft- 
ed on his crabbed stock, which in three years 
rejoices in alien flowers and apples not its own. 
Are we not gardeners, all of us, to fill our time 
with greener life, with fragrant beauty, and rich, 
timely fruit ? There are bright, cheery morning 
hours good for putting in the seed ; moments of 



224 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 



sunnier delight, when some success not looked for. 
the finding of a friend, husband, or wife, the ad- 
vent of a child, mellows the hours. Then nurse 
the tender plant of piety ; one day its bloom will 
adorn your gloomy hour, and be a brightness in 
many a winter day which now you reck not of. 

There are days of sadness when it rains sorrow 
on you, — when you mourn the loss of friends, their 
sad defeat in mortal life, or, worse still, the failure 
of yourself, your wanderings from the way of life, 
or prostrate fall therein. Use, then, O man, these 
hours for penitence, if need be, and vigorous re- 
solve. Water the choicest, tender plants ; one day 
the little seedling you have planted with your tears 
shall be a broad tree, and under its arms you will 
screen your head from the windy storm and the 
tempest; — yes, find for your bones a quiet grave 
at last. 

Do you commit a sin, an intentional violation 
of the law of God, you may make even that help 
you in your religious growth. He who never hun- 
gered knows not the worth of bread ; who never 
suffered, nor sorrowed, nor went desolate and alone, 
knows not the full value of human sympathy and 
human love. I have sometimes thought that a 
man who had never sinned nor broke the integrity 
of his consciousness, nor, by wandering, disturbed 
the continuity of his march towards perfection — 



CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 225 

that he could not know the power of religion to 
fortify the soul. But there are no such men. We 
learn to walk by stumbling at the first ; and spirit- 
ual experience is also bought by errors of the soul. 
Penitence is but the cry of the child hurt in his 
fall. Shame on us that we affect the pain so oft, 
and only learn to whine an unnatural contrition ! 
Sure I am that the grief of a soul, self-wounded, 
the sting of self-reproach, the torment of remorse 
for errors of passion, for sins of calculation, may 
quicken any man in his course to manhood, till he 
runs and is not weary. The mariner learns wis- 
dom from each miscarriage of his ship, and fronts 
the seas anew to triumph over wind and wave. 

Some of you are young men and maidens. 
You look forward to be husbands and wives, to 
be fathers and mothers, one day. Some of you 
seek to be rich, some honored. Is it not well to 
seek to have for yourself a noble, manly character, 
to be religious men and women, with a liberal 
development of mind and conscience, heart and 
soul? You will meet with losses, trials, disap- 
pointments, in your business, in your friends and 
families, and in yourselves ; many a joy will also 
smile on you. You may use the sunny sky and 
its falling weather alike to help your religious 
growth. Your time, young men, what life and 
manhood you may make of that ! 



226 CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS. 

Some of you are old men, your heads white 
with manifold experience, and life is writ in sto- 
ried hieroglyphics on cheek and brow. Venerable 
faces! I hope I learn from you. I hardly dare 
essay to teach men before whom time has unrolled 
his lengthened scroll, men far before me in the 
experience of life. But let me ask you, if, while 
you have been doing your work, — have been gath- 
ering riches, and tasting the joys of time, — been 
son, husband, father, friend, — you have also great- 
ened, deepened, heightened your manly character, 
and gained the greatest riches, — the wealth of a 
religious soul, incorruptible and undefiled, the joys 
that cannot fade away ? 

For old or young, there is no real and lasting 
human blessedness without this. It is the sole 
sufficient and assured defence against the sorrows 
of the world, the disappointments and the griefs 
of life, the pains of unrequited righteousness and 
hopes that went astray. It is a never-failing foun- 
tain of delight. 

tl There are briers besetting every path, 

That call for patient care ; 
There is a cross in every lot, 

And an earnest need for prayer ; 
But the lowly heart that trusts in Thee 

Is happy everywhere." 



VII. 



OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF 
STRENGTH. 



THE LORD IS THE STRENGTH OF MY LIFE. — Ps. XXVii. 1. 

There are original differences of spiritual 
strength. I mean of intellectual, moral, affection- 
al, and religious power ; these depend on what 
may be called the natural spiritual constitution of 
the individual. One man is born with a strong 
spiritual constitution, another with a weak one! 
So one will be great, and the other little. It is no 
shame in this case, no merit in that. Surely it is 
no more merit to be born to genius than to gold, 
to mental more than to material strength ; no more 
merit to be born to moral, affectional, and relig- 
ious strength than to mere intellectual genius. 
But it is a great convenience to be born to this 
large estate of spiritual wealth, a very great ad- 
vantage to possess the highest form of human 
power, — eminence of intellect, of conscience, of 
the affections, of the soul. 



228 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



There is a primitive intellectual difference 
amongst men which is ineffaceable from the man's 
mortal being, as the primary qualities are inefface- 
able from the atoms of matter. It will appear in 
all the life of the man. Even great wickedness 
will not wholly destroy this primeval loftiness of 
mind. Few men were ever better born in respect 
to intellect than Francis Bacon and Thomas Went- 
worth, — " the great Lord Verulam " and " the 
great Earl of Strafford " : few men ever gave larger 
proof of superior intellect, even in its highest forms 
of development, of general force and manly vigor 
of mind ; few ever used great natural ability, great 
personal attainments, and great political place, for 
purposes so selfish, mean, and base. Few ever 
fell more completely. Yet, spite of that misdirec- 
tion and abuse, the marks of greatness and strength 
appear in them both to the very last. Bacon was 
still " the wisest, brightest," if also " the meanest 
of mankind." I know a great man may ruin him- 
self; stumbling is as easy for a mammoth as a 
mouse, and much more conspicuous ; but even in 
his fall his greatness will be visible. The ruin of 
a colossus is gigantic, — its fragments are on a 
grand scale. You read the size of the ship in the 
timbers of the wreck, fastened with mighty bolts. 
The Tuscan bard is true to nature as to poetry 
in painting his odious potentates magnificently 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



229 



mighty even in hell. Satan feJlen seems still " not 
less than archangel rained " ! 

I do not deny this natural and ineffaceable dif- 
ference between men in reference to their strength 
of character, their quantity of being. I am not 
going to say that conscious piety will make a 
great man out of a little one ; that it would give 
to George the Third the strength of Charle- 
magne or Napoleon. No training will make the 
shrub-oak a tree-oak ; no agriculture swell a cape 
to a continent. But I do mean to say, that 
religion, conscious piety, will increase the actu- 
al strength of the great and of the little ; that 
through want of religious culture the possibility 
of strength is diminished in both the little and the 
great. 

Not only does religion greaten the quantity of 
power, it betters its quality at the same time. So 
it both enlarges a man's general power for him- 
self or his brother, and enhances the mode of that 
power, thus giving him a greater power of useful- 
ness and a greater power of welfare, more force to 
delight, more force to enjoy. This is true of relig- 
ion taken in its wide sense, — a life in harmony 
with myself, in concord with my brother, in unity 
with my God; true of religion in its highest form, 
the conscious worship of the Infinite God with 
the normal use of every faculty of the spirit, every 

20 



230 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



limb of the body, and every portion of material or 
social power. 

Without this conscious religious development, 
it seems to me that no strength or greatness is 
admirably human ; and with it, no smallness of 
opportunity, no littleness of gift, is contemptible or 
low. I reverence great powers, given or got ; but 
I reverence much more the faithful use of powers 
either large or little. 

Strength of character appears in two general 
modes of power, accordingly as it is tried by one 
or other of two tests. It is power to do, or power 
to bear. One is active, and the other passive, but 
both are only diverse modes of the same thing. 
The hard anvil can bear the blows of the hard 
hammer which smites it, because there is the same 
solidity in the nether anvil which bears up, as in 
the upper hammer which bears down. It takes as 
much solidity to bear the blow as to give it ; only 
one is solidity active, the other merely passive. 

Religion increases the general strength and vol- 
ume of character. The reason is plain: Religion 
is keeping the natural law of human nature in its 
threefold mode of action, — in relation to myself, 
to my brother, and to my God ; the coordination 
of my will with the will of God, with the ideal of 
my nature. So it is action according to my na- 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 231 

ture, not against it; it is the agreement of my 
finite will with the Infinite Will which controls 
the universe and provides for each portion thereof. 

Now, to use a thing against its nature, to abuse- 
it, is ultimately to fail of the natural end thereof, 
and waste the natural means provided for the at- 
tainment of the end. A boat is useful to journey 
with by sea, a chaise to journey with by land ; use 
each for its purpose, you enjoy the means and 
achieve the end. But put off to sea in your chaise, 
or put on to land in your boat, you miss the end, 
— you lose also the means. This is true of the 
natural, as of the artificial instruments of man; of 
his limbs, as of his land-carriages or sea-carriages. 
Hands are to work with, feet to walk on ; the feet 
would make a poor figure in working, the hands an 
ill figure in essaying to walk. The same rule holds 
good in respect to spiritual faculties as in bodily 
organs. Passion is not designed to rule conscience, 
but to serve ; conscience not to serve passion, but 
to rule. If passion rule and conscience serve, the 
end is not reached, you are in a state of general 
discord with yourself, your brother, and your God ; 
the means also fail and perish ; conscience becomes 
weak, the passion itself dies from the plethora of 
its indulgence ; the whole man grows less and less, 
till he becomes the smallest thing he is capable of 
dwindling into. But if conscience rule and passion 



232 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



serve, all goes well ; you reach the end, — welfare 
in general, harmony with yourself, concord with 
your brother, and unity with your God ; you keep 
the means, — conscience and passion are each in 
position, and at their proper function ; the faculties 
enlarge until they reach their entire measure of 
possible growth, and the whole man becomes the 
greatest he is capable of being here and now. 

You see this strength of character, which natu- 
rally results from religion, not only in its general 
forms, but in its special modes. Look a moment 
at the passive power, the power to endure suffer- 
ing. See the fact in the endurance of the terrible 
artificial torments that are used to put down new 
forms of religion, or extinguish the old. While 
men believe in the divinity of matter, they try 
suspected persons by exposure to the elements, — 
walking over red-hot ploughshares, holding fire in 
the naked hand, or plunging into water. All new 
forms of religion must pass through the same or- 
deal, and run the gauntlet betwixt bishops, priests, 
inquisitors ; between scribes, Pharisees, and hypo- 
crites. See how faithfully the trial has been borne. 
Men naturally shrink from pain: the stout man 
dreads the toothache, he curls at the mention of 
the rheumatism, and shivers at the idea of an 
ague ; how suddenly he drops a piece of burning 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



233 



paper which would tease his hand for a minute! 
But let a man have religion wakened in his heart, 
and be convinced that it is of God, let others at- 
tempt to drive it out of him, and how ready is he 
to bear all that malice can devise or tyranny inflict! 
The thumb-screws and the racks, the whip, the 
gallows, and the stake, — the religious man has 
strength to bear all these; and Ridley holds his right 
arm, erring now no more, in the flame, till the hand 
drops off in the scalding heat. You know the 
* persecutions of Peter and Paul, the martyrdom of 
Stephen, the trials of the early Christians, — Ig- 
natius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenseus, and the rest. 
They all went out to preach the form of religion 
themselves had practised, and enjoyed in their 
own souls. What could they offer men as an 
inducement to conversion? The common argu- 
ment at this day, — respectability, a comfortable 
life and an honorable death, the praise of men ? 
Could Origen and Cyprian tell the young maid- 
en : " Come to our church, and you will be sure 
to get a nice husband, as dainty fine as any pa- 
trician in Ephesus or Carthage ? " Could they 
promise " a fashionable company in prayer," and 
a rich wife, to the young man who joined their 
church ? It was not exactly so ; nay, it was con- 
siderably different. They could offer their converts 
hunger, and nakedness, and peril, and prison, and 
20* 



234 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



the sword ; ay, and the scorn of relatives and the 
contemporaneous jeer of a cruel world. But " the 
word of God grew and prevailed." The nice vo- 
luptuary, the dainty woman, too delicate to set 
foot upon the ground, became converted, and then 
they could defy the axe of the headsman and the 
tormentor's rack. Unabashed they stood before 
wild beasts ; ay, they looked in the face of the 
marshals and commissioners and district judges of 
those times, — men who perverted law and spit on 
justice with blasphemous expectoration, — and yet* 
the religious soul did not fear ! 

In the Catholic Church this is Saint Victorian's 
Day. Here is the short of his story. He was an 
African nobleman of Adrumetum, governor of 
Carthage with the Roman title of Proconsul, the 
wealthiest man in the province of Africa. He 
was a Catholic ; but Huneric, the king of the Van- 
dals in Africa, was an Arian, and in the year four 
hundred and eighty began to persecute the Cath- 
olics. He commanded Victorian to continue the 
persecution, offering him great wealth and the 
highest honors. It was his legal obligation to 
obey the king. " Tell the king that I trust in 
Christ," said the Catholic proconsul ; " the king 
may condemn me to the flames, to wild beasts, to 
any tortures, I shall never renounce the Church." 
He was put to the most tormenting tortures, and 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



235 



bore them like a man. Others met a similar death 
with the same steadiness of soul. Even the exe- 
cutioners felt the effect of such heroism of endur- 
ance. " No body," said they, " embraces our re- 
ligion now ; every body follows the example of 
the martyrs." 

The Catholic Church tried the same weapons 
against heretics that had been first found want- 
ing when turned against the early Christians. 
The tyrant, with the instinct of Pharaoh, seeks to 
destroy the male children, the masculine intellect, 
conscience, affections, soul. Then a new race of 
Pauls and Justins springs up ; a new Ignatius, 
Polycarp, and Victorian, start into life. The 
Church may burn Arnaldo da Brescia, Savona- 
rola, Wiclifle, Huss; — what profits it? The re- 
ligion which the tyrant persecutes makes the vic- 
tim stronger than the victor; then it steals into 
the heart of the people, and as the wind scatters 
the martyr's ashes far and wide, so the spectacle 
or the fame of his fidelity spreads abroad the sen- 
timent of that religion which made him strong. 
The persecuting Nile wafts Moses into the king's 
court, and the new religion is within the walls. 

You know how the Puritans got treated in Eng- 
land, the Covenanters in Scotland ; you know how 
they bore trial. You have heard of John Graham, 
commonly called Lord Claverhouse. He lived 



236 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



about two hundred years ago in England and Scot- 
land, one of that brood of monsters which still dis- 
grace mankind, and, as vipers and rattlesnakes, 
seem born to centralize and incarnate the poison 
of the world. An original tormentor, if there had 
never been any cruelty he would have invented it, 
of his own head. Had he lived in New England in 
this time, he would doubtless have been a United 
States commissioner under the Fugitive Slave 
Bill, perhaps a judge or a marshal; at any rate, a 
slave-hunter, a kidnapper in some form; and of 
course he would now be as much honored in this 
city as he then was in Edinburgh and London, 
and perhaps as well paid. Well, Lord Claver- 
house had a commission to root out the Covenant- 
ers with fire and sword, and went to that work 
with the zeal of an American kidnapper. By 
means of his marshals he one day caught a Scotch 
girl, a Covenanter. She was young, only eigh- 
teen ; — she was comely to look upon. Her name 
was Margaret. Graham ordered her to be tied 
to a stake in the sea at low water, and left to 
drown slowly at the advance of the tide. It was 
done: and his creatures — there were enough of 
them in Scotland, as of their descendants here, — 
his commissioners, his marshals, and his attorneys 
— sat down on the shore to watch the end of poor 
Margaret. It was an end not to be forgotten. In 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



237 



a clear, sweet voice she sung hymns to God till 
the waves of the sea broke over her head and 
floated her pious soul to her God and his heaven. 
Had Scotland been a Catholic country there would 
have been another Saint Margaret, known as the 

11 Genius of the shore 
In her large recompense, who would be good 
To all that wander in that perilous flood." 

You all know what strength of endurance relig- 
ion gave to Bunyan and Fox, and their compeers 
the Quakers, in Boston as well as England ; to 
the Mormons in Missouri, and in all quarters of 
Christendom. Religion made these men formi- 
dably strong. The axe of the tormentor was as 
idle to stay them as the gallows to stop a sun- 
beam. This power of endurance is general, of all 
forms of religion. It does not depend on what is 
Jewish in Judaism, or Christian in Christianity, 
but on what is religious in religion, what is hu- 
man in man. 

But that is only a spasmodic form of heroism, 
— the reaction of nature against unnatural evil. 
You see religion producing the same strength to 
endure sufferings which are not arbitrarily im- 
posed by cruel men. The stories of me L rtyrdom 
only bring out in unusual forms the silent hero- 
ism which works unheeded in society every day. 
The strength is always there ; oppression, which 



23S 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



makes wise men mad. in making religious men 
martyrs, only finds and reveals the heroism : it 
does not make it, more than the stone-cutter makes 
the marble which he hews into the form his thought 
requires. The heroism is always there. So there 
is always enough electricity in the air above this 
town to blast it to atoms and burn it to cinders. 
Not a babe could be born without it : not a snow- 
drop bloom; yet no one heeds the silent force. 
Let two different streams of air, one warm, the 
other cold, meet here, the lightning tells of the 
reserved power which hung all day above our 
heads. 

I love now and then to look on the strength of 
endurance which religion gives the most heroic 
martyrs. Even in these times the example is 
needed. Though the fagot is only ashes now, 
and the axe's edge is blunt, there are other forms 
of martyrdom, bloodless but not less cruel in mo- 
tive and effect. But I love best to see this same 
strength in lovelier forms, enduring the common 
ills of life, — poverty, sickness, disappointment, the 
loss of friends, the withering of the fondest hopes 
of mortal men. One is occasional lightning, thun- 
dering and grand, but transient : the other is daily 
sunshine, which makes no noisy stir on any day. 
but throughout the year is constant, creative, and 
exceeding beautiful. 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH, 



239 



Did you never see a young woman with the 
finest faculties, every hope of mortal success crush- 
ed in her heart; see her endure it all, the slow 
torture which eats away the mortal from the im- 
mortal, with a spirit still unruffled, — with a calm 
cheerfulness and a strong trust in God ? We all 
have seen such things, — the loveliest forms of 
martyrdom. 

Did you never see a young man with large 
faculties, fitting him to shine among the loftiest 
stars of this our human heaven, in the name of 
duty forego his own intellectual culture for the 
sake of a mother, a sister, or a father dependent 
upon his toil, and be a drudge when he might else 
have been a shining light; and by the grace of 
religion do it so that in all of what he counted 
drudgery he was kinglier than a king ? Did you 
never see the wife, the daughter, or the son of a 
drunkard sustained by their religion to bear sor- 
rows to which Nebuchadnezzar's sevenfold-heat- 
ed furnace were a rose-garden, — bear it and 
not complain, — grow sweeter in that bitterness? 
There are many such examples all about us, and 
holy souls go through that misery of torture clean 
as sun-light though the pestilential air of a town 
stricken with plague. So the pagan poets tell a 
story of the fountain Arethusa, which, for many a 
league, ran through the salt and bitter sea, all the 



240 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



way from Peloponnesus to Trinacria, and then 
came up pure, sweet, and sparkling water, far off 
in Ortygia, spreading greenness and growth in the 
valley where the anemone and the asphodel paid 
back their beauty to the stream which gave them 
life. 

Such are daily examples of the fortitude and 
strength to suffer which religion gives. When we 
look carelessly on men in their work or their play, 
busy in the streets or thoughtful in a church, we 
think little of the amount of religion there is in 
these human hearts : but when you need it in times 
of great trial, then it comes up in the broad streets 
and little lanes of life. Disappointment is a bitter 
root, and sorrow is a bitter flower, and suffering is 
a bitter fruit, but the religious soul makes medi- 
cine thereof, and is strengthened even by the poi- 
sons of life. So out of a brewer's dregs and a 
distiller's waste in a city have I seen the bee suck 
sweetest honey for present joy, and lay it up for 
winters use. Yea, the strong man in the fable, 
while hungering, found honey in the lion's bones 
he once had slain ; got delight from the destroyer, 
and meat out of the eaters mouth. 

Why is it that the religious man has this power 
to suffer and endure ? Religion is the normal mode 
of life for man, and when he uses his faculties ac- 
cording to their natural law, they act harmonious- 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



241 



ly, and all grow strong. Besides this, the religious 
man has a confidence in his God ; he knows there 
is the Infinite One, who has foreseen all and pro- 
vided for all, — provided a recompense for all the 
unavoidable suffering of his children here. If you 
know that it is a part of the purpose of the Infinite 
Father that you must suffer to accomplish your 
own development, or the development of mankind, 
when you know that the suffering must needs be 
a good for you, — then you will not fear. " The 
flesh may quiver as the pincers tear," but you 
quiver not ; the will is firm, and firm is the un- 
conquerable trust. " Be still, O flesh, and burn ! n 
says the martyr to the molecules of dust that form 
his chariot of time, and the three holy children of 
the Hebrew tale sing psalms in their fiery furnace, 
a Fourth with them ; and Stephen in his stoning 
thinks that he sees his God, and to Paul in his 
prison there comes a great, cheering light ; — yes, 
to Bunyan, and Fox, and Latimer, and John Rog- 
ers, in their torments ; to the poor maiden stifled 
by the slowly strangling sea ; to her whose crystal 
urn of love is shattered at her feet ; to the young 
man who sees the college of his dream fade off 
into a barn ; and the mother, wife, or child who 
sees the father of the family bloat, deform, and 
uglify himself into the drunkard, and, falling into 
the grave, crush underneath his lumbering weight 
all of their mortal hopes. Religion gives them all 
21 



242 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



a strength to suffer, and be blessed by the trials they 
endure. There are times when nothing outward 
is left but suffering. Then it is a great thing to 
have the stomach for it, the faith in God which 
disenchants the soul of pain. Did not Jesus, in 
the Gospel, have his agony and his bloody sweat. 
— the last act of that great tragedy? did not re- 
ligion come, an angel, to strengthen him, and all 
alone, deserted, forsaken, he could say, " I am not 
alone, for the Father is with me " ? 

" The darts of anguish fix not where the seat 
Of suffering hath been thoroughly fortified 
By acquiescence in the Will supreme, 
For time and for eternity, by Faith, 
Faith absolute in God, including Hope, 
And the defence that lies in boundless love 
Of His perfection ; with habitual dread 
Of aught unworthily conceived, endured 
Impatiently, ill done or left undone, 
To the dishonor of His holy Name. 
Soul of our souls and safeguard of the world ! 
Sustain, thou only canst, the sick of heart. 
Eestore their languid spirits, and recall 
Their lost affections unto Thee and Thine. 

11 Come labor, when the worn-out frame requires 
Perpetual sabbath ; come disease and want, 
And sad exclusion through decay of sense ; 
But leave me unabated trust in Thee ; — 
And let Thy favor to the end of life 
Sustain me with ability to seek 
Eepose and hope among eternal things, 
Father of earth and heaven ! and I am rich, 
And will possess my portion in content. 55 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH* 



243 



See this same strength in another form, — the 
power to do. Religion not only gives the femi- 
nine capacity to suffer, but the masculine capabil- 
ity to do. The religious man can do more than 
another without religion, who is his equal in other 
respects ; because he masters and concentrates his 
faculties, making them work in harmony with each 
other, in concord with mankind, in unity with 
God ; and because he knows there is a God who 
works with him, and so arranges the forces of the 
universe, that every wrong shall be righted, and 
the ultimate well-being of each be made sure of 
for ever. Besides, he has a higher inspiration and 
loftier motive, which strengthen, refine, and enno- 
ble him. Adam Clarke tells us how much more of 
mere intellectual labor he could perform after his 
conversion than before. Ignatius Loyola makes 
the same confession. They each attribute it to 
the technical peculiarity of their sectarianism, to 
Methodism or Catholicism, to Christianity; but 
the fact is universal, and applies to religion under 
all forms. It is easily explained by the greater 
harmony of the faculties, and by the higher motive 
which animates the man, the more certain trust 
which inspires him. An earnest youth in love 
with an earnest maid, — his love returned, — gets 
more power of character from the ardor of her 
affection and the strength of his passion ; and 



244 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



when the soul of man rises up in its great act of 
love to become one with God, you need not mar- 
vel if the man is strong. " I can do all things," 
says Paul, " through Christ who strengthened me." 
Buddhists and Hebrews and Mohammedans say 
the same of their religion. 

Then religion helps a man to two positive things, 
— first, to a desire of the right; next, to a progres- 
sive knowledge and practice of the right. Jus- 
tice is always power; whoso has that commands 
the world. A fool in the right way, says the prov- 
erb, can beat a wise man in the wrong. The 
civilized man has an advantage over the savage, in 
his knowledge of nature. He can make the forces 
of the universe toil for him : the wind drives his 
ship ; the water turns his mill, spins, and weaves 
for him ; lightning runs his errands ; steam carries 
the new lord of nature over land or ocean without 
rest. He that knows justice, and does it, has the 
same advantage over all that do it not. He sets 
his mill on the rock, and the river of God for ever 
turns his wheels. 

The practice of the right in the common affairs 
of life is called Honesty. An honest man is one 
who knows, loves, and does right because it is 
right. Is there any thing but this total integrity 
which I call religion, that can be trusted to keep a 
man honest in small things and great things, in 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



245 



things private and things public ? I know nothing 
else with this power. True it is said, " Honesty- 
is the best policy " ; and as all men love the best 
policy, they will be honest for that reason. But 
to follow the best policy is a very different thing 
from being honest; the love of justice and the love 
of personal profit or pleasure are quite different. 
But is honesty the best policy ? Policy is means 
to achieve a special end. If the end you seek be 
the common object of desire, — if it be material 
pleasure in your period of passion, or material profit 
in your period of ambition, — if you seek for money, 
for ease, honor, power over men, and their appro- 
bation, — then honesty is not the best policy ; is 
means from it, not to it. Honesty of thought and 
speech is the worst policy for a minister's clerical 
reputation. Charity impairs an estate ; unpopular 
excellence is the ruin of a man's respectability. 
It is good policy to lie in the popular way; to 
steal after the respectable fashion. The hard cred- 
itor is surest of his debt ; the cruel landlord does 
not lose his rent ; the severe master is uniformly 
served the best; who gives little and with a grudge 
finds often the most of obvious gratitude. He that 
destroys the perishing is more honored in Chris- 
tendom than he who comes to save the lost. The 
slave-hunter is a popular Christian in the Amer- 
ican Church, and gets his pay in money and 
21* 



246 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



ecclesiastical reputation. The honesty of Jesus 
brought him to the bar of Herod and Pilate ; their 
best policy nailed him to the cross. Was it good 
policy in Paul to turn Christian? His honesty 
brought him to weariness and painfullness, to cold 
and nakedness, to stripes and imprisonment, to a 
hateful reputation on the earth. Honesty the best 
policy for personal selfishness ! Ask the " Holy 
Alliance." Honesty is the means to self-respect, 
to growth in manly qualities, to high human wel- 
fare, — a means to the kingdom of heaven. "When 
men claim that honesty is the best policy, is it this 
which they mean? 

I will not say a man cannot be honest without 
a distinct consciousness of his relation to God; 
but I must say, that consciousness of God is a 
great help to honesty in the business of a shop, or 
the business of a nation ; and without religion, 
unconscious if no more, it seems to me honesty is 
not possible. 

By reminding me of my relation to the universe, 
religion helps counteract the tendency to selfishness. 
Self-love is natural and indispensable ; it keeps 
the man whole, — is the centripetal power, repre- 
senting the natural cohesion of all the faculties. 
Without that, the man would drop to pieces, as it 
were, and be dissolved in the mass of men, as a 
lump of clay in the ocean. Selfishness is the ab- 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



247 



normal excess of this self-love. It takes various 
forms. In the period of passion, it commonly 
shows itself as intemperate love of sensual pleas- 
ure ; in the period of ambition, as intemperate 
love of money, of power, rank, or renown. There 
are as many modes of selfishness as there are pro- 
pensities which may go to excess. Self-love be- 
longs to the natural harmony of the faculties, and 
is a means of strength. Selfishness comes from 
the tyranny of some one appetite, which subordi- 
nates the other faculties of man, and is a cause 
of weakness, a disqualification for my duties to 
myself, to my brother, and my God.* Now the 
effort to become religious, working in you a love 
of man and of God, a desire of harmony with 
yourself, of concord with man and unity with Him, 
diminishes selfishness, develops your instinctive 
self-love into conscious self-respect, into faithful- 
ness to yourself, and so enlarges continually the 
little ring of your character, and makes you strong 
to bear the crosses and do the duties of daily life. 

Much of a man's ability consists in his power to 
concentrate his energies for a purpose ; in power to 
deny some private selfish lust — of material pleasure 
or profit — for the sake of public love. I know of 
naught but religion that can be trusted to promote 
this power of self-denial, which is indispensable to 
a manly man. There can be no great general 



248 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



power without this ; no strong character that lies 
deep in the sea, and holds on its way through 
sunshine and through storm, and, unabashed by- 
tempests, comes safe to port. I suppose you all 
know men and women, who now are not capable 
of any large self-denial, — the babies of mere self- 
ish instinct. It is painful to look on such, domi- 
neered over by their propensities. Compared to 
noble-hearted men and women, they are as the 
mushroom and the toadstool to the oak, under 
whose shade the fungus springs up in a rainy night 
to blacken and perish in a day. Self-denial is in- 
dispensable to a strong character, and the loftiest 
kind thereof comes only of a religious stock, — 
from consciousness of obligation and dependence 
upon God. 

In youth the seductions of passion lead us easi- 
ly astray ; in manhood there are the more danger- 
ous seductions of ambition, when lust of pleasure 
gives way to lust of profit ; and in old age the 
man is often the victim of the propensities he deli- 
cately nursed in earlier life, and dwindles away 
into the dotage of a hunker or a libertine. It is 
easy to yield now to this, and then to that, but 
both mislead us to our partial and general loss, 
to weakness of power and poverty of achievement, 
to shipwreck of this great argosy of mortal life. 
How many do you see slain by lust of pleasure ! 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



249 



How many more by lust of power, — pecuniary, 
social, or political power ! Religious self-denial 
would have kept them strong and beautiful and 
safe. 

Religion gives a man courage. I do not mean 
the courage which comes of tough muscles and 
rigid nerves, — of a stomach that never surren- 
ders. That also is a good thing, the hardihood of 
the flesh ; let me do it no injustice. But I mean 
the higher, moral courage, that can look danger 
and death in the face unaw T ed and undismayed ; 
the courage that can encounter loss of ease, of 
wealth, of friends, of your own good name ; the 
courage that can face a world full of howling and 
of scorn, — ay, of loathing and of hate ; can see all 
this with a smile, and, suffering it all, can still toil 
on, conscious of the result, yet fearless still. I do 
not mean the courage that hates, that smites, that 
kills, but the calm courage that loves and heals 
and blesses such as smite and hate and kill; the 
courage that dares resist evil, popular, powerful, 
anointed evil, yet does it with good, and knows it 
shall thereby overcome. That is not a common 
quality. I think it never comes without religion, 
It belongs to all great forms of religious excel- 
lence : it is not specifically Hebrew or Christian, 
but generically human and of religion under all 
forms. 



250 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



Without this courage a man looks little and 
mean, especially a man otherwise great, — with 
great intellect, and great culture, and occupying a 
great place. You see all about you how little 
such men are worth ; too cowardly to brave a tem- 
porary defeat, they are swiftly brought to perma- 
nent ruin. Look over the long array of brilliant 
names in American, English, universal history, and 
see what lofty men, born to a large estate of intel- 
lect, and disciplined to manifold and brilliant men- 
tal power, for lack of courage to be true amid 
the false, and upright amid the grovelling, have 
laid their proud foreheads in the dust, and mean 
men have triumphed over the mighty ! 

Did you never read here in your Old Testa- 
ment, here in your New Testament, here in your 
Apocrypha, how religion gave men, yea, and 
women too, this courage, and said to them, " Be 
strong and very courageous ; turn not to the right 
hand, neither to the left," — and made heroes out 
of Jeremiah and Elias ? Did you never read of 
the strength of courage, the courage of conscience, 
which religion gave to the " unlearned and igno- 
rant men," who, from peasants that trembled before 
a Hebrew Rabbi's copious beard, became apos- 
tles to stand before the wrath of kings and not 
quake, to found churches by their prayers, and to 
feed them with their blood ? You know, w r e all 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



251 



know, what courage conscious religion gave to our 
fathers. Their corporal courage grew more firmly 
knit, as men learned by bitter blows who crossed 
swords with them on the battle-field; but their 
moral courage grew giant high. You know how 
they dwelt here, amid what suffering, yet with 
what patience ; how they toiled to build up these 
houses, these churches, and the institutions of the 
state. 

With this honesty, this self-denial, there comes 
a total energy of character which nothing else 
can give. You see what strength religion gives ; 
what energy and continual persistence in their 
cause it gave to men like the Apostles, like the 
martyrs and great saints of the Christian Church, 
of the Hebrew, the Mohammedan, and the Pagan 
Church. You may see this energy in a rough form 
in the soldiers of the English revolution, in the 
" Ironsides " of Cromwell ; in the stern and un- 
flinching endurance of the Puritans of either Eng- 
land, the Old or the New, who both did and suf- 
fered what is possible to mortal flesh only when 
it is sustained by a religious faith. But you see 
it in forms far more beautiful, as represented by 
the missionaries who carry the glad tidings of 
their faith to other lands, and endure the sorrows 
of persecution with the long-suffering and loving- 



252 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



kindness we worship in the good God. This is 
not peculiar to Christianity. The Buddhists had 
their missionaries hundreds of years before Jesus 
of Nazareth first saw the light. They were the 
first that ever went abroad, not to conquer, but 
convert; not to get power, or wealth, or even wis- 
dom, but to carry the power of the mind, the 
riches of conscience and the affections, and the 
wisdom of the soul; and in them you find the 
total energy which religious conviction gives to 
manly character in its hour of peril. But why go 
abroad to look for this ? Our own streets exhibit 
the same thing in the form of the philanthropist. 
The Sister of Charity treads the miserable alleys of 
Naples and of Rome ; the Catholic Visitor of the 
Poor winds along in the sloughs and slums of St. 
Giles's Parish in Protestant London, despised and 
hated by the well-endowed clergy, whose church 
aisles are never trodden save by wealthy feet ; and 
in the mire of the street, in the reeking squalidness 
of the cellars, where misery burrows with crime, 
he labors for their bodies and their souls. In our 
own Boston do I not know feeble-bodied and 
delicate women, who with their feet write out the 
gospel of loving-kindness and tender mercy on the 
mud or the snow of the kennels of this city, — 
women of wise intellect and nice culture, who, 
like that great philanthropist, come to seek and to 
save that which is lost ! 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



253 



Look at the reformers of America at this day ; 
— some of them men of large abilities, of com- 
mensurate culture, of easy estate, once respected, 
flattered, and courted too by their associates, but 
now despised for their justice and their charity, 
hated for the eminent affection which makes them 
look after the welfare of the criminal, the drunkard, 
the pauper, the outcast, and the slave, and feared 
for the power with which they assert the rights of 
man against the wrongs which avarice inflicts. See 
the total energy which marks these men, whose 
life is a long profession of religion, — their creed 
writ all over the land, and their history a slow 
martyrdom, — and you may see the vigor which 
comes of religious conviction. These are the no- 
bler forms of energy. The soldier destroys, at best 
defends, while the philanthropist creates. 

Last of all these forms of strength, religion gives 
the power of self-reliance ; reliance on your mind 
for truth, on your conscience for justice, on your 
heart for love, on your soul for faith, and through 
all these reliance on the Infinite God. Then you 
will keep the integrity of your own nature spite of 
the mightiest men, spite of a multitude of millions, 
spite of states and churches and traditions, and a 
worldly world filled with covetousness and priest- 
craft. You will say to them all, " Stand by, and 
22 



254 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



let alone ; I must be true to myself, and thereby 
true to my God.*' 

I think nothing but religion can give any man 
this strength to do and to suffer ; that without 
this, the men of greatest gift and greatest attain- 
ment too, do not live out half the glory of their 
davs, nor reach half their stature. Look over the 
list of the world's great failures, and see why 
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon came each to 
such an untimely and a vulgar end! Had they 
added religion to their attainments and their con- 
quests, what empires of welfare would they not 
hold in fee, and give us to enjoy! Without it, 
the greatest man is a failure. With it, the small- 
est is a triumph. He adds to his character; he 
enjoys his strength; he delights while he rejoices, 
growing to more vigorous manliness; and when 
the fragrant petals of the spirit burst asunder and 
crowd off this outer husk of the body, and bloom 
into glorious humanity, what a strong and flame- 
like flower shall blossom there for everlasting life ! 

There are various forms of strength. Wealth is 
power; office is power; beauty is power; knowl- 
edge is power. Religion too is power. This is 
the power of powers, for it concentrates, moves, 
and directs aright the force of money, of office, of 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



255 



beauty, and of knowledge. Do men understand 
this ? They often act and live as if they knew it 
not. Look at our " strong men," not only mighty 
by position in office or on money, but mighty by 
nature. In what are they strong ? In a knowledge 
of the passions and prejudices of men; of the in- 
terests and expedients and honors of the day ; in a 
knowledge of men's selfishness and their willing- 
ness to sin ; in experienced skill to use the means 
for certain selfish, low, and ignoble ends, organiz- 
ing a contrivance against mankind ; in power of 
speech and act to make the better seem the worse, 
and wrong assume the guise of right. It is in this 
that our "great men" are chiefly great. They are 
weak in a knowledge of what in man is noble, 
even when he errs ; they know nothing of justice ; 
they care little for love. They know the animal 
that is in us, not the human, far less the godlike. 
Mighty in cunning, they are weak in a knowledge 
of the true, the just, the good, the holy, and the 
ever-beautiful. They look up at the mountains 
and mock at God. So they are impotent to know 
the expedient of eternity, what profits now and 
profits for ever and ever. Blame them not too 
much ; the educational forces of society breed up 
such men. as college lads all learn to cipher and to 
scan. 

In the long run of the ages see how the relig- 



256 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 

ious man distances the unreligious. The memory 
of the man who seeks to inaugurate cunning into 
the state for his own behoof, is ere long gibbeted 
before the world, and his lie cast out with scorn 
and hate ; and the treason of the traitor to man- 
kind is remembered only with a curse : while the 
wisdom of the wise, the justice of the upright, the 
love of the affectionate, and the piety of holy- 
hearted men, incarnated in the institutions of the 
state, live and will for ever live, long after Rome 
and America have gone to the ground. Tyrants 
have a short breath, their fame a sudden ending; 
and the power of the ungodly, like the lamp of the 
wicked, shall soon be put out ; their counsel is car- 
ried, but it is carried headlong. He that seeks 
only the praise of men gets that but for a day ; 
while the religious man. who seeks only to be faith- 
ful to himself and his God. and represent on earth 
the absolute true and just, all heedless of the ap- 
plause of men, lives, and will for ever live, in the 
admiration of mankind, and in "the pure eyes and 
perfect witness of all-judging Jove.*' Champollion 
painfully deciphers the names of the Egyptian 
kings who built the pyramids and swayed mil- 
lions of men. For three thousand years that let- 
tered Muse, the sculptured stone, in silence kept 
the secret of their name. But the fugitive slave, a 
bondsman of that king, with religion in his heart, 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



257 



has writ his power on all the continents, and dot- 
ted the name of -Moses on every green or snow- 
clad isle of either sea. That name shall still en- 
dure when the last stones of the last pyramid be- 
come gas and exhale to heaven. The peasant of 
Galilee has embosomed his own name in the relig- 
ion of mankind, and the world will keep it for ever. 
Foolish men building their temple of fame on the 
expedients of to-day, and of selfishness and cun- 
ning and eloquent falsehood! That shall stand, — 
will it? On the frozen bosom of a northern lake 
go, build your palace of ice. Colonnade and capi- 
tal, how they glitter in the light when the northern 
dawn is red about the pole, or the colder moon 
looks on your house of frost ! " This will endure. 
Why carve out the granite, and painfully build 
upon the rock ? " Ah me ! at the touch of March, 
the ice-temple and its ice-foundation take the leap 
of Niagara; and in April the skiff of the fisher- 
man finds no vestige of all that pomp and pride. 
But the temple of granite, — where is that? Ask 
Moses, ask Jesus, ask mankind, what power it is 
that lasts from age to age, when selfish ambition 
melts in the stream of time. 

Well, we are all here for a great work, not mere- 
ly to grow up and eat and drink, to have estates 
called after us and children born in our name. 



258 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



We are all here to be men ; to do the most of 
human duty possible for us, and so to have the 
most of human right and enjoy the most of hu- 
man welfare. Religion is a good thing in itself; 
it is the betrothed bride of the spirit of man, to be 
loved for her own sweet sake; not a servant, to 
be taken for use alone. But it is the means to 
this end, — to strength of character, enlarging the 
little and greatening the great. 

You and I shall have enough to suffer, most of 
us ; enough to do. We shall have our travail, our 
temptation, perhaps our agony, but our triumph 
too. 

O smooth-faced youths and maids ! your cheek 
and brow yet innocent of stain, do you believe 
you shall pass through life and suffer naught? 
Trial will come on you ; — you shall have your 
agony and bloody sweat. Seek in the beginning 
for the strength which religion brings you, and 
you shall indeed be strong, powerful to suffer, and 
mighty also to do. I will not say your efforts will 
keep you from every error, every sin. When a 
boy, I might have thought so ; as a man, I know 
better, by observation and my own experience too. 
Sin is an experiment that fails ; a stumble, not 
upright walking. Expect such mishaps, errors of 
the mind, errors of the conscience, errors of the 
affections, errors of the soul. What pine-tree 



SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 



259 



never lost a limb ? The best mathematician now 
and then misses a figure, must rub out his work 
and start anew. The greatest poet must often 
mend a line, and will write faulty verses in the 
heat of song. Milton has many a scraggy line, 
and even good Homer sometimes nods. What 
defects are there in the proud works of Raphael 
and Angelo! Is there no failure in Mozart? In 
such a mighty work as this of life, such a com- 
plication of forces within, of circumstances with- 
out, such imperfect guidance as the world can 
furnish in this work, I should expect to miss the 
way sometimes, and with painful feet, and heart 
stung by self-reproach, or grief, or shame, retread 
the way shamefaced and sad. The field that is 
ploughed all over by Remorse, driving his team 
that breathe fire, yields not a faint harvest to the 
great Reaper's hand. Trust in God will do two 
things. It will keep you from many an error ; 
nobody knows how great a gain this is, till he has 
tried, Then it will help you after you have wan- 
dered from the way. Fallen, you will not despair, 
but rise the wiser and the stronger for the fall. 
Do you look for strength to your brave young 
hearts, and streams of life to issue thence ? Here 
you shall find it, and with freshened life pass on 
your way. Religion is the Moses to smite the 
rock in the wilderness. 



260 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION. 



O bearded men, and women that have kept and 
hoarded much in your experienced hearts ! you 
also seek for power to bear your crosses and to 
do your work. Religion will be the strength of 
your life, — you may do all things through this. 
When the last act of the mortal drama draws to- 
wards a close, you will look joyfully to the end, 
not with fear, but with a triumphant joy. 

There are two great things which make up the 
obvious part of life, — to do, to suffer. Behind 
both as cause, and before each as result, is one 
thing greater, — to be. Religion is true Being, 
normal life in yourself, in nature, in men, and in 
God. 



VIII. 



OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF JOY. 



I WILL GO UNTO GOD, MY EXCEEDING JOT. — Ps. xliii. 4, 

Joy is not often mentioned in religious books. 
It is sometimes thought to have no place in relig- 
ion ; at least none here and now. The joy of the 
religious man is thought to be chiefly in the fu- 
ture. Religion is painted with a sad countenance. 
Artists sometimes mix joyous colors in their repre- 
sentations thereof, but theologians almost never. 
With them, religion is gloomy, severe, and grim. 
This is eminently the case in New England. The 
Puritans as a class were devoutly religious in their 
way, but they were sad men ; they had many fast- 
days and few times of rejoicing. Even Sunday, 
which to the rest of Christendom was an occasion 
of festivity, was to them a day of grimness and of 
fearing the Lord ; a weariness to the old men, and 
an intolerable burthen to the children, Look at 



262 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



the pictures of those men, so bony and gaunt and 
grim ; of the women, so austere and unloving in 
their look. The unjoyous characteristics of Puri- 
tanism still cleave to us, and color our mode of 
religion at this day, and, spite of ourselves, taint 
our general philosophy and view of life. 

The Catholic Church is less serious, less in ear- 
nest with religion, than the Church of the Puri- 
tans, — less moral and reliant on God than the 
Protestant Church in general, — so it seems to 
me ; but even there little room is left for joy. 
Their richest music is a Miserere, not an Exal- 
temus or a Te Deum. The joyous chanting of 
Christmas, of Easter, and of Pentecost is inferior 
to the sad wail of Palm-Sunday and Good-Fri- 
day. The Stabat Mater and the Dies Irce are the 
most characteristic hymns of the Catholic Church. 
The paintings and statues are chiefly monuments 
of woe, — saints in their torments, Jesus in his 
passion ; his stations are stations of affliction, and 
the via sacra of his life is painted as a long via 
dolorosa ; God is represented as a Thunderer, 
distinguished chiefly by self-esteem and destruc- 
tiveness. 

Take the Christian Church as a whole, from 
its first day to this, study all expressions of the 
religious feeling and thought of Christendom, in 
literature, painting, and music, it is strangely defi- 



SOURCE OF JOY, 



263 



cient in joy. Religion is unnatural self-denial ; 
morality is symbolized by a celibate monk, eating 
parched pease and a water-cress ; piety, by a joyless 
nun. The saints of the Christian Church, Cath- 
olic and Protestant, are either stern, heroic men, 
who went first and foremost on a field of battle, 
to peril their lives, men whose heroism was of iron, 
— and they have never been extolled above their 
merit, — or else weeping men, sentimental, sickly, 
sad, sorrowful, and afraid. Most preachers would 
rather send away their audience weeping, than 
with a resolute, a cheerful, and a joyous heart. 
Yet nothing is easier to start from a multitude than 
a tear. Cotton Mather, in his life of his kinsman, 
Nathaniel, a pious clergyman that died young, 
mentions as his crowning merit the fulness of his 
fastings, the abundant mortifications he needless- 
ly imposed upon himself, his tear-stained face. 
Smiles are strange phenomena in a church ; sad- 
ness and tears are therein at home. 

Even the less earnest sects of America, calling 
themselves " Liberal Christians," whose ship of 
souls does not lie very deep in the sea of life, seem 
to think joy is not very nearly related to relig- 
ion. The piety of a round-faced and joyous man 
is always a little suspected. The Cross is still 
the popular symbol of Christianity, and the type 
of the saint is a man of sorrows and acquainted 



264 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



with grief, having no form or comeliness. Ser- 
mons of joy you seldom hear; the voice of the 
pulpit is mainly a whine ; its flowers are night- 
shade, and its psalms a Miserere. 

Every body knows what joy is, — a certain sense 
of gladness and of pleasure, a contentment and a 
satisfaction, sometimes noisily breaking into tran- 
sient surges of rapture, sometimes rolling with the 
tranquil swell of calm delight. It is a state which 
comes upon any particular faculty, when that finds 
its natural gratification. So there may be a partial 
joy of any one faculty, or a total joy of the whole 
man, all the faculties normally developed and nor- 
mally gratified. If religion be the service of God 
by the normal development, use, and enjoyment of 
every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, 
and every power acquired over matter or man, 
then it is plain that religion must always aim at, 
and under favorable circumstances will achieve, a 
complete and total joy for all men. 

There is no man wholly destitute of some par- 
tial and transient joy; for if all the conditions 
needful to the welfare of each faculty of mind, or 
to each appetite, were wanting, then, part by part, 
the man would perish and disappear. On the other 
hand, no man, I think, has ever had a complete, 
total, and permanent enjoyment of every part of 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



265 



his nature. That is the ideal to which we tend, but 
one not capable of complete attainment in a pro- 
gressive being. For if the idea] of yesterday has 
become the actual of to-day, to-morrow we are 
seized with manly disquiet and unrest, and soar 
up towards another ideal. 

We have all more or less of joy, the quantity 
and quality differing amazingly amongst men. 
There are as many forms of joy as there are pro- 
pensities which hunger and thirst after their satis- 
faction. What a difference in the source whence 
men derive their customary delight ! 

Here is a man whose whole joy seems to come 
from his body; not from its nobler senses, offering 
him the pleasures of the ear and the eye, but from 
the lower parts of the flesh, imbruted now to 
passions which seem base when made to minister 
the chief delight to man. We could not think 
highly of one who knew no joy above the pleasure 
of eating and drinking, or of any other merely ani- 
mal satisfaction. Such joys cannot raise man far. 
If one had his chief delight in fine robes, the taste 
would rather degrade the man. Yet these two 
appetites, for finery in food and finery in dress, 
have doubtless done their part to civilize mankind. 
It is surely better for the race to rejoice in all the 
sumptuous delicacies of art, than to feed precari- 
ously on wild acorns which the wind shakes down 

23 



266 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



The foolish fondness for gay apparel has served a 
purpose. Nay, so marvellous is the economy of 
God in his engineering of the world, that no drop 
of waste water runs over the dam of the universe ; 
and as the atom which now sparkles in the rain- 
bow, the next minute, shall feed a fainting rose, 
so even these sensual desires have helped to uplift 
mankind from mere subordination to the material 
world. 

There is another man whose chief joy is not 
merely bodily, but yet resides in his selfish appe- 
tites, in his lust of money, or lust of power. 1 pass 
by the joy of the miser, of the ambitious politician, 
of the pirate and the kidnapper. They are so well 
known amongst us that you can easily estimate 
their worth. 

Now and then we find men whose happiness 
comes almost wholly from pure and lofty springs, 
from the high senses of the body or the high facul- 
ties of the spirit, — joys of the mind, of the con- 
science, of the affections, of the soul. Difference 
of quality is more important than difference in 
mere bulk ; an hour of love is worth an age of 
lust. We all look with some reverence on such 
as seek the higher quality of joy. 

You are pleased to see birds feeding their wide- 
mouthed little ones ; sheep and oxen intent upon 
their grassy bread ; reapers under a hedge en- 



SOURCE OF JOY, 



267 



joying their mid-day meal, reposing on sheaves 
of corn new cut. All this is nature ; the element 
of necessity consecrates the meal. Artistic pic- 
tures of such scenes are always attractive. But 
pictures or descriptions of feasts — where the de- 
sign is not to satisfy a natural want, but where 
eating and drinking are made a luxurious art ? 
the end of life, and man seems only an append- 
age to the table — are never wholly pleasing. 
You feel a little ashamed of the quality of such 
delight. Even the marvellous pencil of Paul of 
Verona here fails to please. But a picture of 
men finding a joy in the higher senses, still 
more in thought, in the common, every-day du- 
ties of life, in works of benevolence or justice, 
in the delight of love, in contemplation, or in 
prayer, — this can touch us all. We like the qual- 
ity of such delight, and love to look on men in 
such a mood of joy. I need only refer to the 
most admired paintings of the great masters, Dutch 
or Italian, and to the poetry which chronicles the 
mortal modes of high delight. The spiritual ele- 
ment must subordinate the material, in order to 
make the sensual joy welcome to a nice eye. In 
the Saint Cecilia of Raphael, in Titian's Marriage 
at Cana, in Leonardo's Last Supper, it is the pre- 
ponderance of spiritual over sensuous emotion that 
charms the eye. So is it in all poetry, from the 



268 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



feeding of the five thousand to the sweet story of 
Lorenzo and Jessica, and all their moonlight scene 
of love, where " heaven is thick inlaid with pa- 
tines of bright gold." 

The joy of a New England miser, gloating over 
extortions which even the law would cough at, the 
delight of a tyrant clutching at power, of a Boston 
kidnapper griping some trembling slave, or count- 
ing out the price of blood which a wicked govern- 
ment bribes him withal, — that would hardly be 
acceptable even here and to-day,* though painted 
with the most angelic power and skill. It would 
be a painted satire, not a pictured praise ; the por- 
trait of a devil's joy can be no man's delight. 

Every body knows the joy of the senses. The 
higher faculties have a corresponding joy. As 
there is a scale of faculties ascending from the 
sense of touch and taste, the first developed and 
most widely spread in the world of living things, 
up to affection, rejoicing to delight, and to the 
religious emotions, which consciously connect us 
with the Infinite God ; so there is a corresponding 
scale of joys, delight rising above delight, from 
the baby fed by his mother's breast to the most 
experienced man, enlarged by science and by art, 

* This sermon was preached April 6, 1851, presently after the 
kidnapping of Mr. Simms, in Boston 5 and before his " trial " was 
completed. 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



269 



filled with a tranquil trust in the infinite protec- 
tion of the all-bounteous God. The higher the 
faculty, the more transcendent is its joy. 

The partial and transient joy of any faculty 
comes from the fractional and brief fulfilment of 
the conditions of its nature ; the complete and per- 
manent joy of the whole man comes from a total 
and continuous supply of the conditions of the 
entire nature of man. 

Now, for this complete and lasting joy, these 
conditions must be thus fulfilled for me as an in- 
dividual, for my family, for my neighborhood, for 
the nation, and for the world, else my joy is not 
complete ; for though I can in thought for a mo- 
ment abstract myself from the family, society, na- 
tion, and from all mankind, it is but for a moment. 
Practically I am bound up with all the world ; an 
integer indeed, but a fraction of mankind. I can- 
not enjoy my daily bread because of the hunger 
of the men I fain would feed. I am not wholly 
and long delighted with a book relating some new 
wonder of science, or offering me some jewelled 
diadem of literary art, because I think straight- 
way of the thousand brother men in this town 
to whom even the old wonders of science and the 
ancient diadems of literary art are all unknown. 
The morsel that I eat alone is not sweet, because 

23* 



270 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



the fatherless has not eaten it with me. Yet we al 
desire this complete joy ; we are not content with- 
out it ; I feel it belongs to me, to ail men, as individ- 
uals and as fractions of society. When mankind 
comes of age, he must enter on this estate. The 
very desire thereof shows it is a part of the Divine 
plan of the world, for each natural desire has the 
means to satisfy it put somewhere in the universe, 
and there is a mutual attraction between the two, 
which at last must meet. Natural desire is the 
prophecy of satisfaction. 

Look over the bountiful distribution of joy in 
the world. It abounds in the lower walks of cre- 
ation. The young fish, you shall even now find 
on the shallow beaches of some sheltered Atlantic 
bay, how happy they are ! Voiceless, dwelling 
in the cold, unsocial element of water, moving 
with the flapping of the sea, and never still amid 
the ocean waves' immeasurable laugh, — how de- 
lighted are these little children of God ! Their life 
seems one continuous holiday, the shoal waters a 
play-ground. Their food is plenteous as the water 
itself. Society is abundant, and of the most un- 
impeachable respectability. They have their little 
child's games which last all day. No one is hun- 
gry, ill-mannered, ill-dressed, dyspeptic, love-lorn, 
or melancholy. They fear no hell. These cold, 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



271 



white-fleshed, and bloodless little atomies seem 
ever full of joy as they can hold; wise without 
study, learned enough without book or school, and 
well cared for amid their own neglect. They rec- 
ollect no past, they provide for no future, the 
great God of the ocean their only memory or fore- 
thought. These little, short-lived minnows are to 
me a sermon eloquent; they are a psalm to God, 
above the loftiest hymnings of Theban Pindar, or 
of the Hebrew king. 

On the land, see the joy of the insects just now 
coming into life. The new-born butterfly, who 
begins his summer life to-day, how joyous he is in 
his claret-colored robe, so daintily set off with a 
silver edge ! No Pharisee, enlarging the borders of 
his garments, getting greetings in the markets and 
the uppermost seat at feasts, and called of men 
" Rabbi," is ever so brimful of glee as our little 
silver-bordered fly. He has a low seat in the uni- 
verse, for he is only a butterfly ; but to him it 
is good as the uppermost; and in the sunny, shel- 
tered spots in the woods, with brown leaves about 
him, and the promise of violets and five-fingers 
by and by, the great sun gently greets him, and 
the dear God continually says to this son of a 
worm, " Come up higher" ! 

The adventurous birds that have just come to 
visit us, how delighted they are, and of a bright 



272 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



morning how they tell their joy! each robin and 
blackbird waking, not with a dry mouth and a 
parched tongue, but with a bosom full of morning 
psalms to gladden the day with " their sweet jar- 
goning." What a cheap luxury they pick up in 
the fields ; and in a clear sunrise and a warm sky 
find a delight which makes the pomp of Nebu- 
chadnezzar seem ridiculous ! 

Even the reptiles, the cold snake, the bunchy and 
calumniated toad, the frog, now newly wakened 
from his hybernating sleep, have a joy in their 
existence which is complete and seems perfect. 
How that long symbol of " the old enemy " basks 
delighted in the sun ! In the idle days which I 
once had, I have seen, as I thought, the gospel of 
God's love written in the life of this reptile, for 
whom Christians have such a mythological hatred, 
but whom the good God blesses with a new, shining 
skin every year, — written more clearly than even 
Nazarene Jesus could tell the tale. No wonder ! it 
was the dear God who wrote His gospel in that 
scroll. How joyously the frogs welcome in the 
spring, which knocks at the icy door of their dwell- 
ing, and rouses them to new life ! What delight 
have they in their thin, piping notes at this time, 
and in the hoarse thunders wherewith they will 
shake the bog in weeks to come ; in their wooing 
and their marriage song ! 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



273 



The young of all animals are full of delight. 
God baptizes his new-born children of the air, the 
land, the sea, with joy; admits them to full com- 
munion in his great church, where He that taketh 
thought for oxen suffers no sparrow to fall to the 
ground without his fatherly love. A new lamb, 
or calf, or colt, just opening its eyes on the old 
world, is happy as fabled Adam in his Eden. 
"With what sportings, and friskings, and frolickings 
do all young animals celebrate their Advent and 
Epiphany in the world of time ! As they grow 
older, they have a wider and a wiser joy, — the 
delight of the passions and the affections, to apply 
the language of men to the consciousness of the 
cattle. It takes the form, not of rude leapings, but 
of quiet cheerfulness. The matronly cow, rumi- 
nating beside her playful and hornless little one, 
is a type of quiet joy and entire satisfaction, — all 
her nature clothed in well-befitting happiness. 

Even animals that we think austere and sad, — 
the lonely hawk, the solitary jay, who loves New 
England winters, and the innumerable shellfish, — 
have their personal and domestic joy, well known 
to their intimate acquaintances. The toad, whom 
we vilify as ugly, and even call venomous, mali- 
cious, and spiteful, is a kind neighbor, and seems 
as contented as the day is long. So is it with the 
spider, who is not the malignant kidnapper that 



274 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



he is thought, but has a little, harmless world of 
joy. A stream of welfare flows from end to end 
of their little life, — not very broad, not very deep, 
but wide and deep enough to bathe their every 
limb, and bring contentment and satisfaction to 
every want. Did not the same God who pours 
out the light from yonder golden sun, and holds 
all the stars in his leash of love, make and watch 
over the smallest of these creatures ? Nay, He who 
leaves not forsaken Jesus alone never deserts the 
spider and the toad. 

Wait a few weeks and go into the fields, of a 
warm day, at morning, noon, or night, and all 
creation is a-hum with happiness, the young and 
old, the reptile, insect, beast, and fowls of heaven, 
rejoice in their brave delight. All about us is full 
of joy, fuller than we notice. Take a handful of 
water from the rotting timbers of a wharf; little 
polyps are therein, medusas and the like, with few 
senses, few faculties; but they all swim in a tide 
of joy, and it seems as if the world was made for 
them alone ; for them the tide ebbs and flows, for 
them the winter goes, the summer comes, and the 
universe subsists for them alone. 

Some men tell us that, at the other extreme of 
the scale, those vast bodies, the suns and satellites, 
have also a consciousness and a delight; that "in 
reason's ear they all rejoice/' But that is poetry. 



SOURCE OF JOY, 



275 



Not in reason's, bat fancy's ear do they rejoice. 
The rest is fact, plain prose, 

All animate creatures in their natural condition 
have, it is true, their woes ; but they are brief in 
time, little in quantity, and soon forgot. When 
you look microscopically and telescopically at the 
natural suffering in the world of animals, you find 
it is just enough to tie the girdle, and hold the 
little creature together, and keep him from violat- 
ing his own individual being ; or else to unite the 
tribe and keep them from violating their social 
being. So it seems only the girdle of the individ- 
ual or the flock, and no more an evil, when thus 
looked at, than the bruises we get in our essays to 
walk. Suffering marks the outer limit of the nar- 
row margin of oscillation left for the caprice of 
the individual animal or man, — the pain a warn- 
ing to mark the bound. 

A similar joy appears in young children well 
born and well nurtured. But the human power 
of error, though still not greater in proportion to 
our greater nature, is so much more, and man so 
little subordinate to his instincts, that we have 
wandered far from the true road of material hap- 
piness. So the new-born child comes trailing the 
errors of his ancestry behind him at his birth. 
Still, the healthy child, wisely cared for, though 
tethered with such a brittle chain of being, is no 
exception to the general rule of joy. He 



276 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



" Is a dew-drop which the mora brings forth, 
Not formed to undergo unkindly shocks. 
Or to be trailed along the soiling earth ; — 
A gem that glitters while it lives, 
And no forewarning gives, 
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife, 
Slips in a moment out of life." 

In the world of adult men there is much less of 
this joy; it is not a great river that with mighty- 
stream runs round and round the world of human 
consciousness, all ignorant of ebb. Our faces are 
care-stricken, not many joyous; most of them 
look as if they had met and felt the peltings of 
the storm, and only hoped for the rainbow. The 
songs of the people are mostly sad ; only the sav- 
age in tropic climes — subordinate to nature, there 
a gentle mistress — is blithe and gay as the monkeys 
and the parrots in his native grove of Africa; and 
there his joy is only jollity, the joy of saucy flesh. 

There are two chief causes for this lack of joy 
with men. This is one : — 

I. We have not yet fulfilled the necessary mate- 
rial conditions thereof. The individual has not 
kept the natural law, and hence has some schism 
in the flesh from his intemperance or want; some 
schism in the spirit from lack of harmony within ; 
or there is some schism between him and the world 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



277 



of matter, he not in unison with things around ; 
he has a miserable body, that goes stooping and 
feeble, must be waited for and waited on, and, like 
the rulers of the Gentiles, exercises authority over 
him ; or he lacks development of spiritual powers ; 
or else is poor, and needs material supplies. 

Or if the special individual is right in all these 
things, and so might have his personal joy, the 
mass of men in your neighborhood, your nation, 
or the world, are deficient in all these, in body, 
mind, and estate, and with your individual joy 
there comes a social grief, and so the worm in the 
bud robs your blossom of half its fragrant bloom, 
and hinders all its fruit. Man is social not less 
than personal ; sympathy is national, even human, 
reaching out to the ends of the earth ; and if the 
hungry cry of those who have reaped down the 
world's harvest smite your ear, why, your bread 
turns sour, and is bread of affliction. The rich 
scholar, with abundant time, in his well-stored li- 
brary, has the less joy in his own books while he 
remembers there are nobler souls that starve for 
the crumbs which fall from his table, or drudge at 
some ungrateful toil not meant for them. The 
healthy doctor, well fed and nicely clad, cannot so 
steel his heart against the ignorance and want 
and pain he daily sees, that his health and table 
and science, and rosy girls, shall give him the 

24 



278 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 

same delight which would come thereof in a world 

free from such society of suffering. 

" The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 

Now the pain which comes from this source, this 
lack of mind, body, and estate, on the part of the 
special individual, or of the race, is all legitimate 
and merciful ; I would not have it less. There 
is never too much suffering of this sort in the 
world, only enough to teach mankind to live in 
harmony with nature, in concord with each other, 
in unity with God. Here, as in the animals, this 
pain is but the girdle round the loins of you or 
me to keep the individual whole ; or about the 
waist of mankind, to keep us all united in one 
brotherhood. Here, as there, suffering marks the 
limit of our margin of oscillation, warns against 
trespass, and says, " Pause and forbear." 

Yet we are all seeking for this joy. Each man 
needs it; knows he needs it, yet needs it deeper 
than he knows. So is it with mankind : the com- 
mon heart by which we live cries to God for satis- 
faction of our every need, and for our natural joy. 
The need thereof stirs the self-love of men to toil, 
the sight of pain quickens the nobler man to rouse 
his sluggish brother to end it all. The sad expe- 
rience of the world shows this, — that man must 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



279 



find his joy, not in subordinating himself to mat- 
ter, or to the instincts of the flesh, as the beasts 
find theirs, or of the weak to the strong, but in 
subordinating matter to mind, instinct to con- 
scious reason, and then coordinating all men into 
one family of religious love. 

II. Here is the other cause. Much of this lack 
of joy comes from false notions of religion, — false 
ideas of God, of man, and of the relation between 
the two. We are bid to think it wicked to be 
joyous. In the common opinion of churches, a re- 
ligious man must be a sad man, his tears become 
his meat. Men who in our day are eminent " lead- 
ers of the churches" are not joyous men ; their faces 
are grim and austere, not marked with manly de- 
light. Some men are sad at sight of the want, 
the pain, and the misdirection of men. It was 
unavoidable that Jesus of Nazareth should oft- 
times be " exceeding sorrowful." He must indeed 
weep over Jerusalem. The Apostles, hunted from 
city to city, might be excused for sadness. For 
centuries the Christian Church had reason to be a 
sad Church. Persecution made our New England 
fathers stern and sour men, and their form of re- 
ligion caught a stain from their history. I see 
why this is so, and blame no man for it. It was 
once unavoidable. But now it is a great mistake 
to renounce the natural joy of life; above all, to re- 



280 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



nounce it in the name of God. No doubt it takes 
the whole human race to represent in history the 
whole of Human Nature ; but if the " Church," 
that is, theological men, make a mock at joy, then 
the " world " will go to excess in the opposite ex- 
treme. Men in whom the religious and moral 
powers are not developed in proportion with the 
intellectual, the aesthetic, or the physical appetites, 
will try to possess this joy, and without religion. 
But nothing is long fruitful of delight when di- 
vorced from the consciousness of God ; nothing 
thrives that is at enmity with God. Such joy is 
poor, heartless, and unsatisfying. Mendn church- 
es set up a Magdalen, a nun, a monk, a hermit, or 
a priest, as representative of religion. Men out of 
churches want joy ; they will flee off where they 
can find it, and leave religion behind them. Yet 
joy without religion is but a poor, wandering Ha- 
gar, her little water spent, her bread all gone, and 
no angel to marshal the way to the well where 
she shall drink and feed her fainting child, and 
say, Thou, God, seest me ! 

There is little joy in the ecclesiastical conscious- 
ness of religion. Writers and preachers of Chris- 
tianity commonly dwell on the dark side of human 
nature. They tell us of our weakness, not of our 
ability to be and to do. They mourn and scold 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



281 



over human folly, human sin, human depravity, 
often leaving untold the noble deeds of man and 
his nobler powers. " Man is a worm," say they. 

They do the same with God. They paint him 
as a king, not as a father; and as a king who 
rules by low and selfish means, for low and selfish 
ends, from low and selfish motives, and with a most 
melancholy result of his ruling. According to the 
common opinion of the Christian churches, his 
is the most unsuccessful despotism that has ever 
been set agoing, leading to the eternal ruin of the 
immense majority of his subjects, as the result of 
the absolute selfishness of the theological deity. 
In the theology called Christian the most conspic- 
uous characteristics of God are great force, great 
self-esteem, and immense destructiveness. He is 
painted as cruel, revengeful, and without mercy, — 
the grimmest of the gods. The heathen devils all 
glower at us through the mask of the theological 
god. The Mexicans worshipped an idea of God, 
to which they sacrificed hundreds of captives and 
criminals. Christian divines tell us of a God that 
will not kill, but torment in hell the greater portion 
of his children, and will feed fat his " glory" with 
the damnation of mankind, the everlasting sacri- 
fice of each ruined soul! If men think that man 
is a worm, and God has lifted the heavenly heel 
to give him a squelch which shall last for ever, the 

24* 



282 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



relation between God and man is certainly not 
pleasant for us to think of. 

God is thought a hard creditor, man a poor 
debtor; "religion" is the sum he is to pay; so 
he puts that down grudgingly, and with the stin- 
giest fist. Or else God is painted as a grim and 
awful judge, man a poor, trembling culprit, shiver- 
ing before his own conscience, and slinking down 
for fear of the vengeance of the awful judge, hell 
gaping underneath his feet. Does any one doubt 
this? Let him read the Book of Revelation, or the 
writings of John Calvin, of Baxter, or Edwards 
or even of Jeremy Taylor. The theological god is 
mainly a great devil, and as the theological devil 
hates " believers,' 7 whom he seeks to devour, so 
the theological god hates " unbelievers," and seeks 
successfully to devour them, gnawed upon eternal- 
ly in hell. In general, theological books represent 
God as terrible. They make religion a melancholy 
sort of thing, unnatural to man, which he would 
escape from if he dared, or if he could. It is sel- 
dom spoken of as a thing good in itself, but valua- 
ble to promote order on the earth, and help men to 
get " saved " and obtain a share of eternal happi- 
ness. It is not a joy, but a burthen, which some 
men are to be well and eternally paid for bearing 
in the heat of the mortal day. Yes, to the major- 
ity of men it is represented as of no use at all in 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



283 



their present or future condition ; for if a man has 
not got Christianity enough to purchase a share in 
heaven, his religion is a useless load, — only a tor- 
ment on earth, and of no value at all in the next 
life! What is the use of religion to men in eter- 
nal torment ? So, by the showing of the most 
respectable theologians, religion can bring no joy, 
save to the " elect," who are but a poor fraction of 
mankind, and commonly exhibit little of it here. 

The general tone of writings called religious 
is sad and melancholy. Religion adorns her brow 
with yellow leaves smitten by the frost, not with 
rosebuds and violets. The leading men in the 
more serious churches are earnest persons, self- 
denying, but grim, unlovely, and joyless men. 
Look through the ecclesiastical literature of the 
Christian world, — it is chiefly of this sad com- 
plexion. The branches of the theological tree are 
rough and thorny, not well laden with leaves, and 
of blossoms it has few that are attractive. It was 
natural enough that the Christians, when perse- 
cuted and trodden down, should weep and wail in 
their literature. In the first three centuries they 
do so ; — in every period of persecution. The dark 
shades of the New England forest lowered over 
New England theology, and Want and War knit 
their ugly brows in the meeting-houses of the day. 
But the same thing continued, and it lasts still. 



284 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



Now it is the habit of Christendom, though some- 
times it seems only a trick. 

In what is called Christian literature nothing- 
surprises you more than the absence of joy. There 
is much of the terror of religion, little of its de- 
lights. Look over the list of the sermons of South, 
Edwards, Chalmers, Hopkins, Emmons, even of 
Jeremy Taylor, and you find few sermons on 
the joys of religion. The same is true of Mas- 
sillon, of Bourdaloue and Bossuet. The popular 
ecclesiastical notion of religion is not to be repre- 
sented as a wife and mother, cheerful, contented, 
and happy in her work, but as a reluctant nun, 
abstracted, idle, tearful, and with a profound mel- 
ancholy ; not the melancholy which comes from 
seeing actual evils we know not how to cure, — 
the sadness of one strong to wish and will, but 
feeble to achieve ; — no, the more incurable sad- 
ness which comes from a distrust of nature and of 
God, and from the habit of worrying about the 
soul, — the melancholy of fear; not the melancholy 
which looks sadly on misery and crime, which 
wept out its " O Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! " but the 
sadness which whines in a corner, and chews its 
own lips from sheer distrust. 

The writers who dwell on the joys of religion 
too often have very inadequate ideas thereof. For 
they all, from Augustine to Chalmers, start with 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



285 



the idea that God is imperfect, and not wholly to 
be trusted. Accordingly they seek and obtain but 
a very one-sided development of their nature, think- 
ing they must sacrifice so much thereof; and hence 
have not that strength of religious character, nor 
that wholeness thereof, which is necessary to com- 
plete manly joy in religion. 

Such being the case, fear of God predominates 
over love of Him ; trust of God is only special 
under such and such circumstances, not universal 
under all circumstances ; and religious joy is thin, 
and poor, and cold, 

You find mention of religious joy in some of 
the great Christian writers, especially among the 
mystics, in Tauler and Kempis, Scougal, Fenelon, 
William Law, and Jacob Behme, not to mention 
others. Even Bunyan has his delectable moun- 
tains, and though in the other world, the light there- 
from shines serene and joyous along the paths of 
mortal life. But in most, if not in all, of these writ- 
ers, religious joy is deemed an artificial privilege, 
reserved by God's decree for only a few, purchased 
by unnatural modes of life, and miraculously be- 
stowed. Even in great-hearted Martin Luther, one 
of the most joyous of men, it is not a right which 
belongs to human nature, and comes naturally from 
the normal action of the faculties of man ; it is the 
result of " grace," not of nature. Thus this relig- 



286 



CONSCIOUS EELIGION AS A 



ious joy of the churches is often hampered and 
restricted, and the man must be belittled before 
he is capable thereof. In the ecclesiastical saint 
there is always something sneaking; some manly 
quality is left out, or driven out, some unmanly 
quality forced in. I believe this has been so in 
all ages of Christianity, and in all Christian sects 
at this day. Study the character and history of 
the saints of the Catholic and Protestant churches. 
Look at their mode of life, their sources and forms 
of joy. You see it is so. They must turn Human 
Nature out of doors before the Divine Nature can 
come in. So the heavenly bridegroom, adorned 
for his wife, comes to a house swept and garnished 
indeed, but cheerless, empty, and cold, only theo- 
logical furniture left in, the bride herself swept out. 
Look at the marbles of antiquity, — at the face of 
pagan Plato, of Aristotle, " the master of such as 
know/' — or at the faces of modern philosophers, 
and compare them with the actual or ideal coun- 
tenance of Christian saints, — with Saint Francis, 
with Saint Thomas, with Ignatius Loyola, with 
the ideal Magdalens and Madonnas of art, or with 
the dark, sad, and woe-stained faces of the lead- 
ing clergy of the predominant sects, — and you see 
at once the absence of natural delight. 

Religion is often separated from common life. 
So a sharp distinction is made between the " flesh " 



SOURCE OF JOY. 287 

and the " spirit." The flesh is all sinful, all that 
belongs to it thought poor, and mean, and low; to 
taste the joys of piety, the senses must be fettered 
and put in jail, and then, where theology has made 
a solitude, it proclaims peace. On the one side is 
the " world," on the other religion ; and there is a 
great gulf fixed between the two, which neither 
Dives, nor Lazarus, nor yet Abraham, can pass 
over. Here all the delight is in " things tempo- 
ral " ; there the delight is only in " things eternal." 
Worldly men have their delight in the things of 
this world, and no more ; heavenly men, only in the 
joys of the next life ; and they who have the worst 
time here shall have the best hereafter. Religion 
is thought out of place at a ball, at a theatre, at 
any amusement ; dancing is thought more than 
half a sin. Religion loves funerals, is seldom at a 
wedding, — only to sadden the scene, — for wom- 
an is bid to be ashamed of natural human love, 
and man of being loved. " We are conceived in 
sin," quoth theology ; " the ' God-man ' was born 
with no human father." 

It seems commonly thought that the joys of 
religion are inconsistent with active daily-life. 
Men who have written thereof are chiefly ascetic 
and romantic persons of retired lives, of shy habits : 
they prefer thought to work, passive contempla- 
tion to active meditation, and dreamy sentimen- 



28S 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



talism to all other and manlier joys. The natural 
result of this is ecstasy, not the normal activity of 
the whole man, but irregular, extravagant, and in- 
sane action of a few noble powers. Hence those 
writings are not wholesome ; the air they exhale is 
close and unhealthy, for such pietism is the sick- 
ness of the soul, not its soundness and its health. 

I believe what I say will apply to almost the 
whole class of writers on sentimental religion, — 
to the mystical writers of the Brahminic, Buddhis- 
tic, Christian, and Mahometan sects. A man must 
be a whole man to write a sound book on a theme 
so deep as the religious joys of man, — his delight 
in nature, in man, and in God. But the false 
ideas of the popular theory corrupt the faculties 
of noble and great men. So, in the writings of 
Law and Fenelon, of Taylor and Henry Move, you 
find this unhealthiness pervading what they do 
and say. There is much you sympathize in, but 
much also which offends a nice taste, and revolts 
the reason, the affections, and all the high facul- 
ties of a sound man. You may see the excess of 
this unhealthiness in the works of St. Bridget or 
of St. Theresa, in Molinos and Swedenborg, even 
in Taylor, in Fenelon, and Augustine ; in the 
dreams and fancied revelations of monks and nuns, 
when nature clamored for her rights, or in the 
sermons and prayers of ascetic clergymen, whom 



SOURCE OF JOY, 



289 



a false idea of God and religion has driven to 
depravity of body and sickness of the soul. 

We may see the effects of this false idea on the 
conduct and character of active men in a Metho- 
dist camp-meeting ; or in a form yet more painful, 
in the pinched faces, and narrow, unnatural fore- 
heads of men and women early caught and im- 
prisoned in some of the popular forms of fear of 
God. I have sometimes shuddered to hear such 
men talk of their joy of religion, — a joy unnatural 
and shameful, which delighted in the contempla- 
tion of torment as the portion of mankind. 

Read the life of St. Hugh, an Archbishop of 
Lyons. See in what his joys of religion consisted. 
If any one spoke of news in his presence, he 
checked them, saying, " This life is all given us 
for weeping and penance, not for idle discourses." 
It was his " constant prayer that God would ex- 
tinguish in his heart all attachment to creatures, 
that His pure love might reign in all his affec- 
tions." " His love of heavenly things made all 
temporal affairs seem burthensome and tedious." 
" Women he would never look in the face, so that 
he knew not the features of his own mother." 
He continually recited the Psalter and the Lord's 
Praver; the latter on one occasion " three hundred 
times in a single night"! 

25 



290 



CONSCIOUS 



RELIGION 



AS A 



In saying all this, I do not wish to blame men, 
I would rather write an apology for the religious 
errors of Pagans or Christians, than a satire there- 
on. I only mention the fact. It is not a strange 
one, for we find analogous errors in the history 
of every department of human affairs. What 
dreams of astrologers and alchemists came before 
the cool, sober thought of chemists and astrono- 
mers ! The mistakes in religion are not greater in 
proportion to the strength of the religious faculty 
and the greatness of the interest at stake, than the 
mistakes in agriculture or politics. The theology 
of Boston is not much worse than its " law and 
order" just now; and they who, in pulpits, admin- 
ister the popular theology, are not much more mis- 
taken than they who, in courts and jails, adminis- 
ter the public law. But in religion these mistaken 
notions have been so common, that the very name 
of religious joy is associated with superstition, 
bigotry, extravagance, madness. You attend a 
meeting " for conference and prayer," and you 
come away a little disgusted, with more pity than 
sympathy for the earnest men who have so mis- 
taken the nature of God, of man, and of the rela- 
tion between the two ; who have so erred as to 
the beginning of religion, its processes and its re- 
sult. You pass thence to a meeting of philoso- 
phical men met for science, or philanthropic men 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



291 



met for benevolence, and what a change ! Both 
are equally earnest ; but in the one all is hot, un- 
natural, restricted, and presided over by fear; in 
the other all is cool, all is free, and there is no 
fear. 

In consequence of this abuse, men often slight 
the sentiment of religion, and deny the real and 
sober joy which it naturally affords. This is a 
great loss, for, setting aside the extravagance, the 
claim to miraculous communion with God, put- 
ting aside all ecstasy, as only the insanity of re- 
ligious action, it is true that, in its widest sense 
and in its highest form, religion is a source of the 
deepest and noblest joys of man. Let us put 
away the childish things and look at the real joys 
of manly religion itself. 

A true form of religion does not interfere with 
any natural delight of man. True religion is 
normal life, not of one faculty alone, but of all 
in due coordination. The human consciousness 
of the Infinite God will show itself, not merely 
in belief, or prayer and thanksgiving, but by the 
legitimate action of every limb of the body and 
every faculty of the spirit. Then all the legiti- 
mate appetites of the body have their place. Do 
you want the natural gratification of the body ? 



292 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION A3 A 



Religion bids you seek it in the natural and legit- 
imate way, not in a manner unnatural and against 
the body's law. It counts the body sacred, as well 
as the soul, and knows that a holy spirit demands 
a holy flesh. Thus it enhances even the delights 
of the body, by keeping every sense in its place. 
The actual commandments of God, written on 
every fibre of human flesh, are not less authorita- 
tive than the Ten which Jehovah is said to have 
written on stone at Sinai. 

Do you seek the active business of life? This 
religion will bid you pursue your calling, hand- 
craft or head-craft, and buy and sell and get gain, 
the Golden Rule your standard measure, and all 
your daily work a sacrament whereby you com- 
municate with man and God. Do you want 
riches, honor, fame, the applause of men ? This 
religion tells you to subordinate the low aim to the 
high ; to keep self-love in its natural channel ; to 
preserve the integrity of your own spirit; and then, 
if you will, and can, to get riches, power, honor, 
fame, and the applause of men, by honestly earn- 
ing them all, so that you shall be the manlier, 
and mankind the richer, for all that you do and 
enjoy. Then the approbation of your own soul, 
and the sense of concord with men and of unity 
with God, will add a certain wholeness to your 
delight in the work of your hands. 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



293 



Do you desire the joys of the intellect working 
in any or all its manifold forms of action? The 
world is all before you where to choose, and Prov- 
idence your guide. The law of God says, " Of 
every tree of the field shalt thou eat. Nothing that 
is natural shall harm thee. Put forth thy hand 
and try. Be not afraid that Truth or Search shall 
ever offend God, or harm the soul of man." Does 
a new truth threaten an old church ? It will build 
up ten new ones in its stead. No man ever loved 
truth too much, or had too much of it, or was too 
diligent in the search therefor. To use the reason 
for reasonable things is a part of religion itself. 
Thus consciousness of God well developed in man 
gives greater joy to the natural delights of the in- 
tellect itself, which it helps to tranquillize and ren- 
der strong. 

You need the exercise of the moral faculties. 
This religion will bid you trust your own con- 
science, never to fear to ask thereof for the ever- 
lasting right, and be faithful thereto. Justice will 
not hurt you, nor offend God ; and if your justice 
pull down the old kingdom, with its statutes of 
selfishness and laws of sin and death, it will build 
up a new and better state in its stead, the Com- 
monwealth of Righteousness, where the eternal 
laws of God are reenacted into the codes of men, 

25 * 



294 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



laws of love and life. No man ever loved justice 
too much, — his own rights, or the rights of men, 
— or was too faithful to his own conscience. Loy- 
alty to that is fealty to God ; and the conscious- 
ness of Him enhances the moral delight of moral 
men, as the intellectual joy of scientific and though t- 
fal men. 

Do you seek the joy of the affections which 
cling to finite objects of attraction, to wife and 
child, brother and sister, parent and friend ? Re- 
ligion will tell you it is impossible to love these 
too much ; that it is impossible to be too affection- 
ate, or to be too wise or too just. No man can be 
too faithful to his own heart, nor have, in general, 
too much love. Love of the " creature " is part of 
the service we owe the Creator ; one of the forms 
of love to God. Conscious piety will enhance the 
delight of mortal affections, and will greaten and 
beautify every form of love, — connubial, parental 
and filial, friendly and philanthropic love. 

Nay, all these — the love of truth and beauty, 
of justice and right, of men — are but parts of the 
great integral piety, the love of God, the Author 
of Truth, of Justice, and of Love. The normal 
delight in God's world, the animal joy in material 
things, the intellectual in truth and beauty, the 
moral in justice and right, the affectional delight 



SOURCE OF JOY. 295 

in the persons of men. the satisfactions of labor of 
hand or head or heart, — all these are a part of 
our large delight in God, for religion is not one 
thing and life another, but the two are one. The 
normal and conscious worship of the Infinite God 
will enlarge every faculty, enhancing its quantity 
and quality of delight. 

Let me dwell vet longer on this affectional de- 
light. Last Sunday I spoke of the Increase of 
Power which comes of the religious use of the fac- 
ulties. One form thereof I purposely passed by 
and left for this hour, — the ability to love other 
men. Religion, by producing harmony with your- 
self, concord with men, and unity with God, pre- 
vents the excess of self-love, enlarges the power of 
unselfish affection, increases the quantity of love, 
and so the man has a greater delight in the wel- 
fare of other men. 

I will not say that this religion increases the 
powers of instinctive affection, except indirectly 
and in general, as it enlarges the man's whole 
quantity of being, and refines its quality. Yet 
much of the power of affection is not instinctive, 
but the result of conscious and voluntary action. 
It is not mere instinct which drives me uncon- 
sciously and bound to love a friend ; I do it con- 
sciously, freely, because it suits the whole of me, 
not merely one impulsive part. The conscious- 



296 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



ness of my connection with God, of my obligation 
to God, of his Providence watching over all, — 
this, and the effort to keep every law He has writ- 
ten in my constitution, enlarges my capability to 
love men. 

I pass by connubial love, wherein affection and 
passion blend each its several bloom, and there 
are still two other forms of conscious love. One 
is friendship, the other philanthropy. 

In friendship I love a man for his good and 
mine too. There is action on both sides ; I take 
delight in him, but only on condition that he takes 
delight in me. I ask much of my friend, not only 
gratitude and justice, but forbearance and patience 
towards me ; — yes, sacrifice of himself. I do this 
not selfishly, not wilfully. I love my friend for 
his character and his conduct, for what he is to 
me and I am to him. My friendship is limited, 
and does not reach out so far as justice, which has 
the range of the world. Who can claim friend- 
ship of any one? The New England kidnapper 
has a right to the philanthropy of his victim ; 
but he seems to have a right to the friendship 
only of pirates and men that would assassinate 
the liberty of mankind. But no man is wholly 
wicked and self-abandoned, and so has forfeited 
all claim to the friendship of the noblest; and such 
is the blessed wealth of the human heart, that it 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



297 



continually runs over with mercy for the merci- 
less, and love for the unlovely. 

In philanthropy I love a man for his sake, not 
at all for mine. I take the delight of justice and 
of charity in him, but do not ask him to take any 
delight in me. I ask nothing of him, not even 
gratitude, nor justice ; perhaps expect neither. I 
love him because he is a man, and without regard 
to his character and conduct; and would feed and 
clothe and warm and bless the murderer, or even 
the kidnapper. Philanthropy makes its sun rise 
on the evil and on the good, and sends its rain on 
the just and on the unjust. Its circle is measured 
by its power, not its will. It is not personal, lim- 
ited in its application to Robert or Marion, but, 
universal as justice, reaching to all, it joins the 
wayfaring Samaritan to his national enemy who 
had fallen among thieves. 

Now I wish to say that religion enlarges a 
man's power of friendship and of philanthropy, 
and consequently enhances the delight of both. 
Look a moment at the joy of each. 

The joy of friendship is a deep and beautiful 
delight. Here you receive as well as give, get not 
only from yourself, as your unconsciousness be- 
comes conscious, and the seed you planted for the 
bread of another becomes a perfect flower for your 
own eye and bosom ; but you receive from another 



298 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



self. This is one of the dearest joys ; it is the mu- 
tuality of affection, your delight in another's person, 
and his delight in you; it is a reciprocity of persons. 
There are those we love not with instinctive pas- 
sion, as man and wife ; nor with instinctive affec- 
tion, as parent and child; nor with the love of 
philanthropy ; but with emotions of another class, 
with friendly love. It is delightful to do kind 
deeds for such, and receive kind deeds from them. 
Not that you need or they need the gift ; but both 
the giving. You need to give to them, they to 
give to you. Their very presence is a still and 
silent joy. After long intimacy of this sort, you 
scarce need speech to communicate sympathy ; 
the fellow-feeling has a language and tells its own 
tale. In loving a friend, I have all the joy of self- 
love without its limitation. I find my life extend- 
ing into another being, his into me. So I multi- 
ply my existence. If I love one man in this way, 
and he love me, I have doubled my delight; if 1 
love two, it is yet farther enlarged. So I live in 
each friend I add to myself ; his joys are mine and 
mine are his ; there is a solidarity of affection be- 
tween us, and his material delights give perma- 
nent happiness to me. As a man enlarges his in- 
dustrial power by material instruments, the wind 
and the river, joined to him by skilful thought, so 
he enlarges his means of happiness by each friend 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



299 



his affection joins to him. A man with a forty- 
friend power would be a millionnaire at the treas- 
ury of love. 

The joy of philanthropy is a high delight, worth 
all the exaltations of St. Hugh, and the ecstasies 
of St. Bridget and St. Theresa. Compare it with 
the rapture which Jonathan Edwards anticipates 
for the " elect" in heaven, looking down upon the 
damned, and seeing their misery, and making 
" heaven ring with the praises of God's justice 
towards the wicked, and his grace towards the 
saints! " Such is the odds betwixt the religion of 
nature and the theology of the Christian Church. 

There is a great satisfaction in doing good to 
others, — to men that you never saw, nor will see, 
— who will never hear of you, but not the less be 
blessed by your bounty, — even in doing good to 
the unthankful and the unmerciful. You have 
helped a poor woman in Boston out of the want 
and wretchedness her drunken husband has brought 
on her, and filled her house withal; you have de- 
livered a slave out of the claw of the kidnapper, 
the " barbarous and heathen kidnapper in Ben- 
guela," or the " Christian and honorable kidnapper 
in Boston," commissioned, and paid for the func- 
tion ; you have taken some child out of the peril of 
the streets, found him a home, and helped him 
grow up to be a self-respectful and useful man ; — 



300 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



suppose the poor woman shall never know the 
name of her benefactor, nor the slave of his de- 
liverer, nor the child of his saviour, — that you get 
no gratitude from the persons, no justice from the 
public ; you are thought a fool for your charity, and 
a culprit for your justice, the government seeking 
to hang you ; still the philanthropy has filled your 
bosom with violets and lilies, and you run over 
with the delight thereof. You would be ashamed 
to receive gratitude, or ask justice. " Father, for- 
give them ! " was the appropriate benediction of 
one of the great masters of philanthropy. Do you 
look for reciprocal affection ? 

" I 've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
With coldness still returning ; 
Alas ! the gratitude of men 
Hath oftener left me mourning.'' 

The good Samaritan, leaving his " neighbor " 
who had fallen among thieves well cared for at 
the inn, jogs home on his mule with a heart that 
kings might envy ; but when he comes again, if 
the man, healed by his nursing, offers thanks, — 
" Nay," says the Samaritan, " nay, now, be still 
and say nothing about it. It is all nothing ; only 
human nature. I could not help it. You would 
do the same!" Such a man feeds his affection 
by such deeds of love, till he has the heart of God 
in his bosom, and a whole paradise of delight. 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



301 



Meantime the Priest and the Levite have hastened 
to the temple, and offered their sacrifice, tithed 
their mint, their anise, and their cumin, made 
broad their phylacteries and enlarged the borders 
of their garments, and dropped with brassy ring 
their shekels in the temple chest, shoving aside 
the poor widow with her two mites, which make a 
farthing; now they stand before the seven golden 
candlesticks and pray, "Father, I thank Thee that 
I am not like other men, who trust in good works 
and the light of nature; I give tithes of all that I 
possess. I thank Thee that I am one of Thine 
Elect, and shall have glory when this Samaritan 
goeth down to the pit." 

I once knew a little boy in the country, whose 
father gave him a half-dime to help the sufferers 
at a fire in New Brunswick ; the young lad dropped 
his mite into the box at church, — it was his earli- 
est alms, — with a deep delight that sweetened 
his consciousness for weeks to come with the 
thought of the good that his five cents would do. 
AYhat were all sweetmeats and dainties to that ? 
Our little boy's mother had told him that the good 
God loved actions such as these, Himself dropping 
the sun and moon into the alms-box of the world ; 
and the grave, sober father, who had earned the 
silver with serious sweat, his broad-axe ringing in 
the tough oak of New England, brushed a tear 

26 



302 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



out of his eye at seeing the son's delight in help- 
ing men whom none of the family had ever seen. 

Philanthropy begins small, and helps itself along, 
sometimes by love of sheep and oxen, and dogs 
and swine. Did not the great Jesus ride into the 
holy city " on the foal of an ass " ? By and by 
our philanthropist goes out to widest circles, makes 
great sacrifice of comfort, of money, of reputation; 
his philanthropic power continually grows, and an 
inundation of delight fills up his mighty soul. 
The shillings which a poor girl pays for mission- 
aries to Burmah and Guinea are shillings which 
bring more delight than the gewgaws they could 
buy. 

I have seen a man buy baskets of cherries in a 
foreign town, and throw them by handfuls to the 
little boys and girls in the streets wholly unknown 
to him. He doubtless got more joy from that, 
than if he had had the appetite of a miser, and 
stomach enough to eat up all the cherries in the 
valley of the Rhine. Men of wealth, who use 
money for philanthropy, to feed the poor, to build 
hospitals and asylums, schools and colleges, get 
more joy from this use thereof, than if they had 
the pecuniary swallow and stomach of a gigantic 
miser, and themselves eat up the schools and col- 
leges, the hospitals and asylums, which others built. 
They who build widows' houses, not they who 
devour them, have the most joy thereof. 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



303 



The man who devotes the larger wealth of the 
mind, reason, understanding, imagination, with all 
the treasures of culture and the graceful dignity 
of eloquence, to serve some noble cause, despised 
as yet, and sacrifices not money alone, but reputa- 
tion, and takes shame as outward recompense for 
truth and justice and love, — think you that he has 
less delight than the worldly man well gifted, cul- 
tivated well, whose mind lies a prostitute to the 
opinion of the mob, and is tricked off with the 
ornaments of shame, and in office shines " the first 
of bartered jades"? Look about you in Boston, 
and answer, ye that know ! Go to the men who 
sacrifice their intellect, their conscience, their affec- 
tions, for place and a name, ask them what they 
have got in exchange for their soul ? and then go 
to such as have left all for God and his law, and 
ask them of their reward. 

Now religion enlarges this capacity for both 
friendship and philanthropy, and so the quantity 
of joy which comes thereof, the happiness of the 
affections. 

This religion has delights peculiar to the relig- 
ious faculty, the happiness of the Soul. I love 
the Infinite God as the ideal of all perfection, — - 
beauty to the imagination, truth to the reason, 



304 CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 

justice to the conscience, the perfect person to the 
affections, the Infinite and Self-faithful God to the 
soul. With this there vanishes away all fear of 
God, all fear of ultimate evil for any thing that is. 
If this escape from fear of God were all, that alone 
were a great thing. How men hate fear! From 
the dreadful God of the popular theology, and its 
odious immortality, they flee to annihilation ; and 
atheism itself seems a relief. But this religion 
which grows out of the idea of the Infinite God 
casts out all fear and the torment thereof. I am 
content to be afraid of some men, stronger and 
wickeder than I ; I know they can hurt me ; I 
know they wish it ; I know they will. To them 
my truth is " error of the carnal reason " ; my jus- 
tice is "violation of the law" of men; my love, 
philanthropic or friendly, is " levying war " ; my 
religion is "infidelity," — "sin against the Holy 
Ghost." I fear these men; they turn their swine 
into my garden to root up and tread down every 
little herb of grace, or plant that flowers for pres- 
ent or for future joy. These men may hang me, 
or assassinate me in the street. I will try to keep 
out of their wicked way. If they will hurt me, I 
must bear it as best I can. But the fear of such 
men will not disturb me much. Their power is 
only for a time. " Thus far, but no farther," quoth 
Death to the tyrant ; and I am free. 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



305 



But to fear God whom I cannot escape, whom 
death cannot defend me from, that would indeed 
be most dreadful. Irreligion is the fear of God. It 
takes two forms. In atheism, the form of denial, 
you fear without naming the object of horror, per- 
haps calling it Chance or Fate ; in superstition, the 
form of affirmation, you fear Him by name, believe 
and tremble. Superstition and atheism are fellow- 
trunks from the same root of bitterness. I would 
as soon worship in the wigwam of Odin and Thor, 
as in the temple of fear called by a Hebrew or a 
Christian name. 

"With a knowledge of the Infinite God, and with 
a fair development of the religious faculties, you 
cease to fear, you love. As nocturnal darkness, 
or the gray mist of morn, is chased away before 
the rising sun, so dread and horror flee off before 
the footsteps of love. Instead of fear, a sense of 
complete and absolute trust in God comes in, gives 
you repose and peace, filling you with tranquillity 
and dear delight in God. Then I know not what 
a day shall bring forth ; some knave may strip me 
of my house and home, an accident — my own or 
another's fault — deprive me of the respect of men, 
and death leave me destitute of every finite friend, 
the objects of instinctive or of voluntary love all 
scattered from before my eyes ; some hireling of 
the government, for ten pieces of silver, may send 

26* 



308 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



me off a slave for all my mortal life ; decay of 
sense may perplex me, wisdom shut out at eye 
and ear ; and disease may rack my frame. Still 
I am not afraid. I know what eternity will be. 
I appeal from man to God. Forsaken, I am not 
alone, uncomforted, not comfortless. I fold my 
arms and smile at the ruin which time has made, 
the peace of God all radiant in my soul. 

Let me look full in the face the evil which I 
meet in the personal tragedies of private life, in 
the social evils which darkly variegate this and all 
other great towns; let me see monstrous political 
sin, dooming one man to a throne because he has 
trod thousands down to wretchedness and dirt; 
nay, let me see such things as happen now in Bos- 
ton. I know no sadder sight on all this globe of 
lands : for to-day a brother-man is held in a dun- 
geon by the avarice of this city, which seeks to 
make him a slave, and he out of his jail sends 
round a petition to the clergymen of Boston, ask- 
ing their prayers for his unalienable rights, — a 
prayer which they will refuse, for those " churches 
of Christ " are this day a " den of thieves," sham- 
bles for the sale of human flesh. Let me look on 
all these things, still I am not dismayed. I know, 
I feel, I am sure of this, that the Infinite God has 
known it all, provided for it all ; that as He is all- 
powerful, all-wise, all-just, all-loving, and all-holy 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



307 



too, no absolute evil shall ever come to any child 
of his, erring or sinned against. I will do all for 
the right: then, if I fail, the result abides with 
God ; it is His to care for, and not mine. Thus 
am I powerful to bear, as powerful to do. I know 
of no calamity, irresistible, sudden, seemingly to- 
tal, but religion can abundantly defend the head 
and heart against its harm. So I can be calm. 
Defeated, and unable to rise, I will " lie low in the 
hand of the Father," smiling with the delight of 
most triumphant trust. 

li These surface troubles come and go, 
Like minings of the sea ; 
The deeper depth is out of reach 
To all, my God, but Thee." 

"With this tranquillity of trust there comes a 
still, a peculiar and silent joy in God. You feel 
your delight in Him, and His in you. The man 
is not beside himself, he is self-possessed and cool. 
There is no ecstasy, no fancied " being swallowed 
up in God"; but there is a lasting inward sweet- 
ness and abiding joy. It will not come out in 
raptures ; it will not pray all night, making much 
ado for nothing done ; but it will fill the whole 
man with beatitudes, with delight in the Infinite 
God. There will be a calm and habitual peace, 
a light around the mortal brow, but a light which 



308 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



passes from glory to glory till it changes into per- 
fect fulness of delicious joy. God gives to the 
loving in their sorrow or their sleep. 

Let us undervalue no partial satisfaction, which 
may be had without the consciousness of God. 
If it be legitimate and natural to man. let it have 
its place and its joy. Religion is not every thing. 
But yet the happiness of this inner human world, 
the delight of loving God and absolutely trust- 
ing Him, is plainly the dearest of all delights. I 
love the world of sense, its beauty to the eye and 
ear ; the natural luxury of taste and touch. It is 
indeed a glorious world, — the stars of earth, that 
gem the ground with dewy loveliness, the flowers 
of heaven, whose amaranthine bloom attracts alike 
the admiring gaze of clown or sage, and draws 
the lover's eye while the same spirit is blooming 
also in his and in another's heart. I love the 
world of science, — the deeper loveliness which 
the mind beholds in each eternal star, or the rathe 
violet of this April day. What a more wondrous 
wonder is the uniform force of nature, whose con- 
stant modes of operation are all exact as mathe- 
matic law, and whence the great minds of Kepler, 
Newton, and Laplace gather the flowers of na- 
ture's art, and bind them up in handfuls for our 
lesser wits! I rejoice in the world of men, in 
the all-conquering toil which subordinates matter 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



309 



unto man, making the river, ocean, winds, to serve 
mankind; which bridles the lightning and rides it 
through the sky. and sails the stormiest seas un- 
harmed. I rejoice in the statutes which reenact 
the eternal laws of God, and administer justice 
betwixt man and man. I delight in human love 
in all its forms, instinctive or voluntary, in friend- 
ship and philanthropy ; the mutuality of persons 
is a dear and sacred joy to me. But the delight 
in God is yet more, — dearer than each of these; 
one we like not much to name. Add to it all 
these several delights, which get each a charm 
from this consciousness of God, and you taste 
and see the real happiness of religion. 

Religion without joy, — it is no religion. Su- 
perstition, the fear of God, might well be sad. 
The devotees thereof seek their delight in violat- 
ing the functions of the body and the spirit. In 
the theological garden the Tree of Life bears fruit 
indeed, a few fair apples, but out of reach, which 
no man can gather till death lift us on his shoul- 
ders, and then they are not apples for a mortal 
mouth. You turn off from the literature of this 
superstition, and look on sunny nature, on the 
minnow in the sea, on the robin in the field, on 
the frog, the snake, the spider, and the toad, and 
smile at sight of their gladness in the world, and 
wish to share it yourself. You turn to the litera- 



310 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



ture which makes a mock at all religion. You 
find enough of it in Greece and Rome at the 
decay of paganism, enough still in brilliant France 
at the dissolution of the Christian mythology, in 
the last century and in this. There also is an 
attempt at joy, but the attempt is vain, and the 
little life of men is full of wine and uproar and 
scarlet women, is poor, unsatisfactory, and short, 
rounded with bitterness at the last. The chief 
tree in that garden blossoms bright enough, but it 
bears only apples of Sodom for a body without a 
soul, a here with no hereafter, in a world without 
a God. In such a place the brilliance of genius is 
only lightning, not light. In such company you 
almost long for the iron age of theology and the 
hard literature of the a divines," lean and old and 
sour, but yet teaching us of a "Will above the 
poor caprice of men, of a Mind beyond this perish- 
ing intellect, of an Arm which made men tremble 
indeed, but also upheld the world. At least there 
is Duty in that grim creation, and self-denial for 
the sake of God. 

Things should not be so. Sensuality is not 
adequate delight for men who look to immortal- 
ity. Religion is not at enmity with joy. No : it 
is irreligion, — atheistic now and now supersti- 
tious. There is no tyranny in God. Man is not 
a worm, the world a vale of tears. Tears enough 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



311 



there are, and long will be, — the morning mist of 
the human day. We can wipe off some of them, 
can rend a little the cloud of ignorance and want 
and crime, and let in the gladdening light of life. 
Nay, grief and sorrow are the world's medicine, 
salutary as such, and not excessive for the ill they 
come to cure. But if we are to make them our 
daily food, and call that angels' bread, surely it is 
a mistake which the world of matter cries out 
upon, and human nature itself forbids. 

The development of religion in man is the con- 
dition of the highest happiness. Temperance, 
the piety of the body, prepares that for the corpo- 
real joys, the humble in their place, the highest 
also in their own ; wisdom, the piety of mind, jus- 
tice, the piety of conscience, and love, the piety of 
the affections, — the love of God with all our 
varied faculties, — these furnish us the complete 
spiritual joy which is the birthright of each man. 
It is the function of religion to minister this hap- 
piness, which comes of self-denial for the sake of 
God. 

The joy of religion must be proportionate to the 
purity of the feeling, the completeness of the idea, 
and the perfection of the act. When all are as 
they should be, what a joy is there for man ! No 
disappointment will have lasting power over you, 



312 



CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A 



no sorrow destroy your peace of soul. Even the 
remembrance of sins past by will be assuaged by 
the experience you thereby have, and by the new 
life which has grown over them. The sorrows of 
the world will not seem as death-pangs, but the 
birth-pains of new and holier life. The sins of 
mankind, the dreadful wars, the tyrannies of the 
strong over the weak, or of the many over the 
few. will be seen to be only the stumbling of this 
last child of God learning to walk, to use his limbs 
and possess himself of the world which waits to be 
mastered by man's wisdom, ruled by man's justice, 
directed by man's love, as part of the great human 
worship of the Infinite God. The Past, the Pres- 
ent, and the Future will appear working together 
for you and all mankind, — all made from the 
perfect motive of God. for a perfect end and as a 
perfect means. You will know that the provi- 
dence of the Great Author of us all is so complete 
and universal, that every wrong that man has suf- 
fered which he could not escape, every sorrow he 
has borne that could not be resisted nor passed by, 
every duty we have done, had a purpose to serve 
in the infinite housekeeping of the universe, and 
is warrant for so much eternal blessedness in the 
world to come. You look on the base and wick- 
ed men who seem as worms in the mire of civili- 
zation, often delighting to bite and devour one 



SOURCE OF JOY. 



313 



another, and you remark that these also are chil- 
dren of God ; that He loves each of them, and will 
suffer no ancient Judas, nor modern kidnapper of 
men, to perish ; that there is no child of perdition 
in all the family of God, but He will lead home 
his sinner and his saint, and such as are sick with 
the leprosy of their wickedness, " the murrain of 
beasts," bowed down and not able to lift them- 
selves up, He will carry in his arms ! 

The joys of the flesh are finite, and soon run 
through. Objects of passion are the dolls where- 
with we learn to use our higher faculties, and 
through all our life the joy of religion, the delight 
in God, becomes more and more. All that an- 
cient saints ever had thereof, the peace which the 
world could not give, the rest unto the soul, which 
Jesus spoke of, — all these are for you and me, 
here and now and to-day, if we will. Our own 
souls hunger for it, God offers it to us all. « Come 
and take," says the Father of the world. 

" While Thou, O my God, art my Help and Defender, 

No cares can o'erwhelm me, no terrors appall ; 
The wiles and the snares of this world will but render 

More lively my hope in my God and my All. 
And when Thou demandest the life Thou hast given, 

With joy will I answer Thy merciful call ; 
And quit Thee on earth, but to find Thee in heaven. 

My Portion for ever, my God, and my All." 



2' 



IX. 



OF CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRA- 
MENTS. 



I WILL HATE MERCY, AND SOT SACRIFICE. — Matt. ix. 13. 

Nothing in human experience is so lovely as 
the consciousness of God ; nothing so tranquilliz- 
ing, elevating, beautifying. See it on a merely 
personal scale in a man, — imagine it on a nation- 
al scale in a great people, — the natural develop- 
ment of religion into its various forms is one of 
the most beautiful phenomena of the world. But, 
alas ! men too often love to meddle a little with 
nature ; not simply to develop, complete, and per- 
fect what begun spontaneously, but to alter after 
individual caprice, so that the universal, eternal, 
and unchangeable force is made to take the form 
of their personal, temporary, and shifting caprice. 

Thus in old gardens you may see pines, yew- 
trees, and oaks clipped into fantastic and unnatu- 
ral forms, looking like any thing but trees, not 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 315 



works of nature, but tricks of skill. A fan, a 
pyramid, or a peacock is taken for the model of 
a tree, and the poor oak or yew is teased into 
some approach to that alien type. But the tree is 
always stinted, ugly, and short-lived under such 
treatment. Pliant nature assumes the form thrust 
on her, and then dies. So the savage, who has 
not yet learned to clothe his body, colors it with 
gall-nuts or ochre, tattooes his fancy upon his skin, 
mutilates the members, and hangs " barbaric pearl 
and gold" where nature left no need nor room for 
ornament. Civilized nations cut off the manly 
beard, and scrimp and screw the female form, warp- 
ing, twisting, distorting, and wasting the dear han- 
diwork of God. So we see men, as those trees, 
walking in a vain show far astray from the guid- 
ance of nature, looking as if " nature's journey- 
men had made them, and not made them well, 
they imitate humanity so abominably." 

But man is not content to meddle with his body. 
He must try his hand on the soul, warping and 
twisting, tattooing and mutilating that also, color- 
ing it with ochre and gall-nuts of more astringent 
bite, and hanging barbaric pendants thereon. At- 
tempts are made to interfere with the religious 
faculty, and give it a conventional direction ; to 
make it take on certain forms of human caprice, 
not human nature. Some monstrous fancy is 



316 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



adopted for the model man, and then common 
men are clipped, and pruned, and headed down, 
or bent in, and twisted into a resemblance to that 
type. Nay, men are thought to be religious, just 
as they conform to the unnatural abomination. 
" God likes none but the clipped spirit," quoth the 
priest. " No natural man for Him. Away with 
your whole men. Mutilation is the test of piety ! " 

If some Apelles or Michael Angelo could paint 
the religious condition of mankind, and represent 
by form and color to the eye all this mutilation, 
twisting, distorting, and tattooing of the invisible 
spirit, what a sight it would be, — these dwarfs 
and cripples, one-legged, one-eyed, one-handed, 
and half-headed, half-hearted men! what a harle- 
quin-show there would be! what motley on men's 
shoulders ! what caps and bells on reverend heads, 
and tattooing which would leave Australia far be- 
hind ! What strange jewels are the fashionable 
theological opinions of Christendom ! Surely such 
liveries were never invented before! In that pic- 
ture men would look as striped as the Pope's 
guard. And if some Adamitic men and women 
were also represented, walking about in this vari- 
colored paradise of theology, arrayed in the natu- 
ral costume of religion, " when unadorned, adorned 
the most," how different they would seem ! Tru- 
ly that gibbeting of theological folly in a pic- 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 317 



ture would be a more instructive " Last Judg- 
ment" than even the great Michael ever thought 
of painting. 

In all forms of religion hitherto there has been 
noticed, not merely the natural difference between 
right and wrong, good and evil, but also an arti- 
ficial and conventional difference between things 
sacred and things profane. Some things are 
deemed common and laical ; others are called holy 
and clerical. This conventional distinction begins 
early, extends wide, and will outlast you and me 
a great many years. Thus, what is now-a-days 
said under oath is officially thought a holy and 
clerical sort of truth ; while what is said without 
oath, though equally correspondent with facts, is 
officially considered only a common and laical sort 
of truth. Some persons, as atheists and such as 
deny the immortality of the soul, are thought in- 
capable of this clerical truth, and so not allowed 
to swear, or otherwise testify, in court. 

In earlier ages of the world, and even now, this 
conventional distinction between laical and cleri- 
cal, sacred and profane, applies to places, as groves, 
hill-tops, temples, and the like ; to times, as new 
moons with one, full moons with another, Friday 
with the Turks, Saturday with the Jews, Sunday 
with the Christians; to things, as statues of saints 

27 * 



318 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



and deities, the tools of public worship ; to per- 
sons, and some are set apart from mankind as 
" the Lord's lot," and deemed holy ; to actions, 
some of which are reckoned pleasing to God, not 
because they are naturally right, good, beautiful, 
or useful, but only as conventionlly sacred ; and to 
opinions,, which for the same reason were pro- 
nounced revealed, and so holy and clerical. 

The laws of the land, for a long time, observed 
this artificial distinction. Thus, a blow struck in 
a church or temple brought a severer punishment 
on the offender than if given elsewhere. Even 
now in Boston it is lawful to " gamble," except 
on Saturday night and Sunday ; and all common 
work on that day is penal. Formerly it was legal- 
ly thought worse to steal church property than 
any other. To rob a beggar was a small thing; it 
was a great sin to steal from a meeting-house. 
To take a whole loaf from a baker's basket was a 
trifle, but to steal the consecrated wafer from the 
church-box brought the offender to the stake. 
Says Charlemagne, " Less mercy is to be shown 
to men who rob and steal from the church, than 
to common thieves." In New England, until late- 
ly, for striking a clergyman a man was punished 
twice as much as for striking a layman ; not be- 
cause a bishop is to be blameless, " no striker," 
and so less likely, and less able, to retaliate, but 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 319 



because he is a holy person. Not long ago there 
was no penalty in this State for disturbing a moral 
meeting, but a severe one for disturbing a relig- 
ious meeting. Opinions connected with religion 
have had laws to defend them. It was once a 
capital crime to deny the Trinity, or the inspiration 
of the Song of Solomon, while a man might deny 
all the axioms of Euclid, all the conclusions of 
science, and the law let him alone. It seems 
that these artificial and foreign " sacred things " 
cannot take care of themselves so well as the in- 
digenous " things of this world." Religion was 
thought to extend to certain places, times, things, 
persons, actions, and opinions, and the law gave 
them a peculiar protection ; but religion was not 
thought to extend much farther. So the law 
stopped there. About three hundred years ago, 
an Italian sculptor was burned alive, in Spain, for 
breaking a statue he had himself made, being 
angry because the customer would not pay the 
price for it. The statue was a graven image of 
the Virgin Mary. Had it been the image of his 
own mother, he might have ground it to powder 
if he liked, or he might have beat his own living 
wife, and had no fault found with him. 

There was a deeper reason for this capricious 
distinction than we sometimes think. Religion 
ought to be the ruler in all the affairs of men ; but 



320 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



before we come to the absolute religion, which 
will one day do this, men begin with certain par- 
ticular things which they claim as divine. Relig- 
ion is to have eminent domain over them, while 
over other things it has a joint jurisdiction with 
" the world." It was well that their idea of relig- 
ion went as far as it did. In the Middle Ages, if a 
fugitive slave fled to the Catholic Church and got 
to the altar, his masters had no legal right to touch 
him but by permission of the priest. The bishop 
interfered, made terms with the masters, and then 
delivered him up or not as they promised well or 
ill. The spirit of religion was supposed to rule in 
the Church, and to protect the outcast. Men 
counselled wiser than they knew. t It was a good 
thing that religion, such a rude notion as men had 
of it, prevailed in that narrow spot. When the 
tyrant would not respect God in all space, it was 
well that he should tremble before the sanctuary 
of a stone altar in a church. He would not re- 
spect a man, let him learn by beginning with a 
priest. If a murderer or a traitor took refuge in 
the heathen temples, nobody could drive him 
away or disturb him, for only God had jurisdic- 
tion in the holy place. So was it with the Hebrew 
cities of refuge : without, the atrocity of the world 
prevailed ; within was the humanity of religion. 
The great begins small. 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 321 



I believe there is no nation acquainted with fire 
but makes this artificial distinction. It is the first 
feeble attempt of the religious faculty to assume 
power in the outward world ; in due time it will 
extend its jurisdiction over all time and space, 
over all things, all thoughts, all men, all deeds. 

It is curious to see how this faculty goes on 
enlarging its territory : one day religion watches 
over the beginning of human life; then over its 
end ; next over its most eminent events, such as 
marriage, or the entrance upon an office, making a 
will, or giving testimony, all of which are con- 
nected with some act of religion. You see what 
it all points towards, — a coordination of all hu- 
man faculties w T ith the religious. Here is the 
great forest of human life, — a tangled brushwood, 
full of wild appetites and prowling calculations, — 
to be cleared up. Religion hews down a few 
trees, burns over a little spot, puts in a few choice 
seeds, and scares off therefrom the wild beasts 
of appetite, the cunning beasts of calculation. 
This is only the beginning of clearing up the whole 
forest. What pains the savage in New England 
took with his little patch of artichokes, beans, 
pumpkins, and corn ! With his rude tools, how 
poorly he dug and watered it, and for what a stingy 
harvest! He often chose the worst spot, he knew 
no better, and got but small return, not knowing 



322 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

how to make bread out of the ground. His gar- 
den was a very little patch in the woods, and 
looked ridiculous beside the square leagues of wild 
woodland, a howling wilderness, that reached from 
the Kennebec to the Mississippi. But it was the 
first step towards cultivating the whole continent. 
So is it with the sacred things of the Hottentot 
and the Hebrew, the Caffre and the Christian. 
Let us not despise the rude commencement of 
great things. 

To simplify the matter, let us consider only the 
Actions pronounced religious. Certain deeds are 
selected and declared sacred, not on account of 
their natural usefulness or beauty, but by some 
caprice. These are declared the " ordinances of re- 
ligion," the " sacraments " thereof, — things which 
represent and express religion, — which it is pro- 
nounced religious to do, and irreligious not to do. 
If there is a national form of religion, then there 
is a national sacrament, established by authority ; 
so a social sacrament for society, established, like 
the " law of honor," by custom, the tacit consent 
of society. Thus is there a domestic sacrament 
for the family, and a personal ordinance of religion 
for the individual man. Accordingly, these con- 
ventional actions come to be thought the exclu- 
sive expression of religion, and therefore pleasing 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 323 

to God ; they are not thought educational, means 
of growth, but final, the essential substance of re- 
ligion. Some man is appointed to look after the 
performance of these actions, and it is thought 
desirable to get the greatest possible number of 
persons to participate in them ; and he that turns 
many to these conventional sacraments is thought 
a great servant of God. 

Look at some of these artificial sacraments. 
The Indians of New England left tobacco or the 
fat of the deer on the rocks, an offering to the 
Great Spirit. With them it was an " ordinance 
of religion," and stood for an act of piety and mo- 
rality both. The clerical Powwows recommended 
the action to the people. What a time they had 
of it, those red savages here in the woods ! It was 
thought impious not to perform the ritual act ; but 
their religion did not forbid its votary to lie, to 
steal, to torture his foe with all conceivable cruelty. 

Two thousand years ago our Teutonic fathers 
in the North of Europe worshipped a goddess 
named Hertha. They had a forest consecrated to 
her on an island ; therein was a sacred image of 
her, which was, now and then, carried about the 
country, on a carriage drawn by cows, — the statue 
covered with cloth and hid from sight. War was 
suspended wherever the chariot came, and weap- 
ons of iron put out of sight. It was then washed 



324 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



in a certain lake ; and, to shroud the whole in grim 
mystery, the priests who had performed the ritual 
act were drowned in the same lake. This was 
the great national sacrament of the people. It 
was wholly artificial, neither useful nor beautiful. 
The statue was an idol of wood ; the cows who 
drew it were no better than other cows. There 
was nothing holy in the image, the grove, or the 
ceremony ; the drowning of the priests was a cruel 
butchery. 

As a sacrament, the New-Hollander cuts off the 
last joint of the little finger of his son's left hand ; 
it is an offering to God, who has made the finger 
a joint too long for piety. 

The Hebrews had their outward ordinances of 
religion, — two personal sacraments of universal 
obligation, binding on each man, — circumcision, 
and rest on the Sabbath. There were two more 
national sacraments, binding on the nation, — the 
formal worship of Jehovah, in Jerusalem, at stated 
times, and by a prescribed ritual ; and the cele- 
bration of the three national festivals. These were 
the sacraments of religion. To eat the paschal 
lamb was a " virtue," to taste swine's flesh a " sin." 
It was a capital crime to heal a sick man on Sa- 
turday. All these were artificial. Circumcision 
was a bad thing in itself, and gets its appropriate 
hit in the New Testament. Rest on the seventh 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 325 

day was no better than on the first; no better than 
work on the second; and worship in Jerusalem, at 
that time, and by that form, no better than wor- 
ship at Jericho, by another form, and at a different 
time. The three feasts were no better than the 
festivals of Easter and of Yule. Yet those things 
were made the tests of piety and of morality. Not 
to attend to them was deemed impiety against 
God, The Hebrew priest took great pains to in- 
terest the people in all this matter, to have the 
sacrifices offered, circumcision performed, the Sab- 
bath and the feasts kept. He who hobbled the 
most in this lame way, and on these artificial 
crutches, was thought the greatest priest. What 
a reputation did puritanical Nehemiah get by his 
zeal in these trifles! But when Jesus of Nazareth 
came, his heart full of natural religion, he made 
way with most of these ordinances. 

Amongst Christians in general there is one spe- 
cific sacramental opinion, — that Jesus of Naza- 
reth is the only Son of God. The opinion itself 
is of no value. You may admit all the excellence 
of Jesus, and copy it all, and yet never have the 
opinion. I do not find that the historical person. 
Jesus, had any such opinion at all. Nay, the 
opinion is an evil, for it leads men to take this 
noble man and prostrate their mind and conscience 
before his words ; just as much as Jesus is elevated 

28 



326 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS, 



above the human is man sunk below it. But for 
ages, in the Church, this has been thought the one 
thing needful to make a man a Christian, to make 
him " pious " and acceptable to God, — the great 
internal ordinance and subjective sacrament of re- 
ligion. 

In the Catholic Church there is another sacra- 
mental opinion distinctive of that Christian sect, 
— the belief that the Roman Church is divine 
and infallible. The Protestants have also their 
distinctive, sacramental opinion, — that the Scrip- 
tures are divine and infallible. 

The consistent Catholic tells you there is no 
salvation without the belief of his sacramental doc- 
trine ; consistent Protestants claim the same value 
for their Shibboleth. So a man is to be " saved," 
and " reconciled with God " by faith ; a general 
faith, — the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the 
only Son of God ; a particular faith, — the belief 
in the divine and infallible Church, or the divine 
and infallible Scriptures. 

Then the Catholics have certain additional out- 
ward sacraments, which are subsidiary, and called 
the " ordinances of religion," — such as baptism, 
confirmation, penance, extreme unction, and the 
like. The Protestants have likewise their addi- 
tional outward sacraments subsidiary to the other, 
and which are their " ordinances of religion," — 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 327 



such as bodily presence at church, which is en- 
joined upon all, and is the great external artificial 
sacrament of the Protestants ; baptism for a few ; 
communion for a selecter few; and belief in all 
the doctrines of the special sect, — an internal 
sacrament which is actually enjoyed by only the 
smallest portion of the selectest few. 

Xow all of these are purely artificial sacra- 
ments. They are not good in themselves. Each 
of them has once had an educational value for 
mankind ; some of them still have, to a portion of 
mankind. But they are not valued for their ten- 
dency to promote natural piety and natural mo- 
rality, only as things good in themselves ; not as 
means to the grace and helps to the glory of relig- 
ion, but as religion itself. Ecclesiastically it is 
thought just as meritorious a thing to attend the 
preaching of a dull, ignorant, stupid fellow, who 
has nothing to teach and teaches it, as to listen to 
the eloquent piety of a Fcnelon, Taylor, or Buck- 
minster, or to the beautiful philanthropy of St. 
Roch, Oberlin, or Channing. Bodily presence in 
the church being the sacrament, it is of small con- 
sequence what bulk of dulness presses the pulpit 
while the sacrament goes on. There is a " real 
presence," if naught else be real. An indifferent 
man baptized with water is thought a much bet- 
ter " Christian " than a man full of piety and mo- 
rality but without the elemental sprinkling. 



328 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



If you asked a New England Powwow for proof 
of the religious character of a red man, he would 
have cited the offering of tobacco to the Great 
Spirit ; a Teutonic priest would refer to the rever- 
ence of his countrymen for the ceremony just 
spoken of; a New-Hollander would dwell on the 
devotion of his neighbors, and show the little 
lingers cut off; a Hebrew would expatiate on the 
sacrament of circumcision, of Sabbath-keeping, of 
attendance upon the formal sacrifice at Jerusalem, 
the observance of the three feasts, and abstinence 
from swine's flesh ; the Christian dwells on his dis- 
tinctive sacramental opinion, that Jesus is the Son 
of Jehovah. Ask the Catholic priests for proof 
that Joseph is a Christian, they will tell you, " He 
believes in the divine and infallible Roman Church, 
and receives its sacraments " ; ask the Protestant 
priests for a proof of their brother's piety, they will 
refer to his belief in the divine and infallible Scrip- 
tures, to his attendance at church, his baptism with 
water, his communion in wine and bread ; and, if 
he is an eminent " saint," to his belief in all the 
technical opinions of his sect. True, they may all 
add other things which belong to real religion, but 
you will find that these artificial sacraments are 
the things relied on as proofs of religion, of Chris- 
tianity, the signs of acceptableness with God, and 
of eternal bliss. The others are only " of works," — 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 329 

these " of faith " ; one of " natural religion," the 
next of " revealed religion " ; morality is provision- 
al, and the sacraments a finality. 

Accordingly, great pains are taken to bring men 
to these results. If a minister does this to large 
numbers, he is called " an eminent servant of the 
Lord," — that is, a great circumciser, a great sprin- 
kler or plunger. Francis Xavier " converted " 
thousands of men to what he called Christianity ; 
they took the sacrament of belief, and of baptism, 
— in due time the others ; and Francis was made 
a saint. But it does not appear that he made 
them any better men, better sons, brothers, hus- 
bands, fathers, better neighbors and friends. He 
only brought them to the artificial sacrament. It 
is often the ambition of a Protestant minister to 
extend the jurisdiction of his artificial sacraments, 
to bring men to baptism and communion, not to 
industry, temperance, and bodily well-being ; not 
to wisdom, justice, friendship, and philanthropy ; 
not to an absolute love of God, a joyous, absolute 
faith in the Dear Mother of us all. 

Let us do no injustice to those poor, leaky ves- 
sels of worship which we have borrowed from the 
Egyptians to whom we were once in bondage. 
They all have had their use. Man sets up his 
mythologies and his sacraments to suit his condi- 

28* 



330 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

lion of soul at the time. You cannot name a 
ceremony connected with religion, howsoever ab- 
surd or wicked it may appear, but once it came 
out of the soul of some man who needed it; and 
it helped him at the time. The tobacco offered 
to Hobomock at Xarragansett, the procession of 
Hertha in Pannonia, the ritual mutilation in New 
Holland, in Judea, or, still worse, in Phrygia and 
Crete, all once had their meaning. Nay, human 
sacrifice was once the highest act of worship 
which some dark-minded savage could compre- 
hend, and in good faith the victim was made ready 
at Mexico or at Moriah. But the best of them 
are only educational, not final ; and the sooner we 
can outgrow those childish things, the better. 

Men often mock at such things. What mouths 
Arnobius and Augustine made at the heathen su- 
perstitions, taking their cue from pagan Lucian of 
Samosata, the prince of scoffers; they have given 
the face of Christendom a twist which it keeps 
to this day. How Voltaire and his accomplished 
coadjutors repeated the mock, at the cost of the 
followers of Augustine and Arnobius ! This is 
hardly wise, and not reverent. Those things are 
to be regarded as the work of children, who have 
their snow-houses in winter, their earth-houses in 
summer, their games and plays, — trifles to us, but 
serious things to the little folk; of great service in 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 331 



the education of the eye and hand, — nay, of the 
understanding itself. How the little boy cries be- 
cause he cannot spin his top like the older broth- 
ers ! He learns to spin it, and is delighted with its 
snoring hum ; learning skill by that, he by and by 
goes on to higher acts of boyish life. So is it 
with these artificial sacraments. Xavier brought 
a new top to the men of India ; Charlemagne 
slew the Saxons who would not accept his, — as 
rude boys force the little ones from old to new 
sports. 

It is no evil to have some things of the sort; no 
more than it is for a boy to ride a stick before he 
can mount a horse ; or for a little girl to fill her 
arms with a Nuremberg baby before she can man- 
age human children. Only the evil is, that these 
things are thought the real and natural sacrament 
of religion ; and so the end thereof is lost in the 
means. That often happens, and is fatal to relig- 
ious growth. If the boy, become a man, still kept 
to his wooden stick, counting it a real horse, bet- 
ter than all the trotters and pacers in Connecti- 
cut, if he had stables for sticks in place of steeds, 
and men to groom and tend his wooden hobby; if 
the girl, become a woman now, still hugged her 
doll from Nuremberg, making believe it was a 
child, — loved it better than sons and daughters, 
and left her own baby to dandle a lump of wood, 



832 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

counting a child only provisional, and the doll a 
finality, — then we should see the same error that 
was committed by Xavier and others, and repeated 
by clergymen and whole troops of Christians. I 
have seen assemblies of Christian divines, excel- 
lent and self-denying men, in earnest session and 
grave debate, who seemed to me only venerable 
boys riding cockhorse on their grandam's crutch. 

The general Christian belief, that Jesus was the 
Son of God, is now no spiritual sacrament; the 
specific belief of the Catholic or Protestant is now 
worth no more. Nay, all these stand in the way 
of the human race, and hinder our march. So the 
outward Christian sacraments — baptism, confir- 
mation, communion, confession, penance, and the 
rest — seem to me only in the way of mankind; 
they are as far from the real ordinances of religion 
as dandling a doll is from the mother's holy duty. 

The natural and real ordinance of religion is in 
general a manly life, all the man's faculties of 
body and spirit developed in their natural and 
harmonious way, the body ruled by the spirit, its 
instincts all in their places, the mind active, the 
conscience, the affections, the soul, all at work in 
their natural way. Religion is the sacrament of 
religion ; itself its ordinance. Piety and goodness 
are its substance, and all normal life its form. The 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



333 



love of God and the love of man, with all that 
belongs thereto, worship with every limb of the 
body, every faculty of the spirit, every power we 
possess over matter or men, — that is the sacra- 
mental substance of religion ; a life obedient to 
the love of God and of man, — that is the sacra- 
mental form of religion. All else is means, pro- 
visional; this the end, a finality. Thus my busi- 
ness, my daily work with the hand, if an honest 
and manly work, is the ordinance of religion to my 
body ; seeking and expressing truth and beauty is 
the ordinance of religion to my mind; doing jus- 
tice to all about me is the moral ordinance of re- 
ligion ; loving men is the natural sacrament of the 
affections ; holiness is the natural ordinance of the 
soul. Putting all together, — my internal con- 
sciousness of piety and goodness, my outward life 
which represents that, — is the great natural sac- 
rament, the one compendious and universal ordi- 
nance. Then my religion is not one thing, and 
my life another ; the two are one. Thus religion 
is the sacrament of religion, morality the test of 
piety. 

If you believe God limited to one spot, then 
that is counted specifically holy; and your religion 
draws or drives you thither. If you believe that 
religion demands only certain particular things, 
they will be thought sacramental, and the doing 



334 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



thereof the proof of religion. But when you know- 
that God is infinite, is everywhere, then all space 
is holy ground ; all days are holy time ; all truth is 
God's word ; all persons are subjects of religious 
duty, invested with unalienable religious rights, 
and claiming respect and love as fellow-children 
of the same dear God. Then, too, all work be- 
comes sacred and venerable ; common life, your 
highest or your humblest toil, is your common ele- 
ment of communion with men, as your act of 
prayer is your communion with the Infinite God. 

This is the history of all artificial sacraments. 
A man rises with more than the common religion ; 
by the accident of his personal character, or by 
some circumstance or event in his history, he does 
some particular thing as an act of religion. To 
him it is such, and represents his feeling of peni- 
tence, or resolution, or gratitude, or faith in God. 
Other men wish to be as religious as he, and do 
the same thing, hoping to get thereby the same 
amount of religion. By and by the deed itself is 
mistaken for religion, repeated again and again. 
The feeling which first prompted it is all gone, 
the act becomes merely mechanical, and thus of 
no value. 

Thousands of years ago some man of wicked 
ways resolved to break from them and start anew, 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 335 



converted by some saint. He calls the neighbors 
together at the side of the Euphrates, the Jordan, 
or the Nile, — elements which he deems divine, 
— and plunges in : " Thus I will wipe off all an- 
cient sin," says he ; " by this act I pledge my- 
self to a new life, — this holy element is witness 
to my vow ; let the saints bear record ! " The 
penitence is real, the resolution real, the act of 
self-baptism means something. By and by other 
penitent men do the same, from the same motive, 
struck by his example. Crowds look on from 
curiosity ; a few idly imitate the form ; then many 
from fashion. Soon it is all ceremony, and means 
nothing. It is the property of the priest; it is 
cherished still, and stands in place of religion. 
The single, momentary dispensation of water 
is thought of more religious importance than 
the daily dispensation of righteousness. Men go 
leagues long on pilgrimage, — to dip them in the 
sacred stream, and return washed, but not clean ; 
baptized, but neither beautiful nor blameless. At 
length it is thought that baptism, the poor, out- 
ward act, atones for a life of conscious sin. Im- 
perial Constantine, hypocritical and murderous, 
mourning that the Church will not twice baptize, 
is converted, but cunningly postpones his plunge 
till old age, that he may sin his fill and then die 
clean and new. 



336 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS, 



So is it with all artificial forms. When they 
become antiquated, the attempt to revive them, to 
put new life therein, is always useless and unna- 
tural; it is only a show, too often a cheat. At 
this day the routine of form is valued most by 
those who care only for the form, and tread the 
substance underneath their feet. Put the wig of 
dead men's hair on your bald head, it is only a 
barber's cap, not nature's graceful covering, and 
underneath, the hypocritic head lies bald and bare. 
Put it on your head if you will, but do not in- 
sist that little children and fair-haired maids shall 
shear off the locks of nature, and hide their heads 
beneath your deceitful handiwork. The boy is 
grown up to manhood, he rides real horses; nay, 
owns, tames, and rears them for himself. How 
idle to ask him to mount again his hobby, or 
to ride cockhorse on his grandam's crutch once 
more? You may galvanize the corpse into mo- 
mentary and convulsive action, not into life. You 
may baptize men by the thousand, plunging them 
in the Jordan and Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, and 
Irrawaddy, if you will, surpassing even Ignatius 
and Francis Xavier. Nay, such is the perfection 
of the arts, that, with steam and Cochituate to 
serve you, you might sprinkle men in battalions, 
yea, whole regiments at a dash. What boots it 
all? A drop of piety is worth all the Jordan, 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 337 



Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, Irrawaddy, — worth 
all the oceans which the good God ever made. 

Men love dramatic scenes. Imagine, then, a 
troop of men — slave-traders, kidnappers, and their 
crew — come up for judgment at the throne of 
Christ. " Behold your evil deeds ! " cries Jesus in 
their ears. " Dear Lord," say they, " speak not 
of that ; we were all baptized, in manhood or in 
infancy, gave bodily presence at a church, en- 
rolled our names among the priest's elect, believed 
the whole creed, and took the sacrament in every 
form. What wouldst thou more, dear Christ? 
Dost thou ask provisional morality of us ? Are 
not these things salvation ? " 

I always look with pain on any effort to put 
the piety of our times into the artificial sacraments 
of another and a ruder age. It is often attempted, 
sometimes with pure and holy feelings, with great 
self-denial ; but it is always worthless. The new 
wine of religion must be put into new bottles. 
See what improvements are yearly made in science, 
in agriculture, weaving, ship-building, in medicine, 
in every art. Shall there be none in religion, none 
in the application of its great sentiments to daily 
life ? Shall we improve only in our ploughs, not 
also in the forms of piety ? 

At this day great pains are taken to put religion 
into artificial sacraments, which, alas ! have no 

29 



338 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS* 

connection with a manly life. I do not know of 
a score of ministers devoting their time and talents 
solely to the advancement of natural piety and 
natural morality, I know of hundreds who take 
continual pains to promote those artificial sacra- 
ments, — earnest, devout, and self-denying men. 
Why is this so ? It is because they think the cer- 
emony is religion ; not religion's accidental furni- 
ture, but religion itself. It is painful to see such 
an amount of manly and earnest effort, of toil and 
self-denial and prayer, devoted to an end so little 
worth. The result is very painful, more so than 
the process itself. We call ourselves a Christian 
people, a religious nation. Why? Are we a re- 
ligious people because the heart of the nation is 
turned towards God and his holy law? The most 
prominent churches just now have practically told 
us, that there is no law of God above the statute 
politicians write on parchment in the Capitol; that 
Congress is higher than the Almighty, the Presi- 
dent a finality ; and that God must hide his head 
behind the Compromise ! Is it because the high- 
est talent of the nation, its ablest zeal, its stoutest 
heroism, is religious in its motive, religious in its 
aim, religious in its means, religious in its end? 
Nobody pretends that. A respectable man would 
be thought crazy, and called a " fanatic," who 
should care much for religion in any of its higher 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 339 

forms. Self-denial for popularity and for money 
or office, — that is common; it abounds in every 
street Self-denial for religion, — is that so com- 
mon ? Are we called Christians because we value 
the character of Jesus of Nazareth, and wish to be 
like him ? Is it the ambition of calculating fathers, 
that their sons be closely like the friend of publi- 
cans and sinners ? Nay, is it the ambition of rever- 
end and most Christian clergymen to be like him ? 
— I mean, to think with the freedom he thought 
withal; to be just with such severe and beauteous 
righteousness ; to love with such affection, — so 
strong, yet so tender, so beautiful, so wide, so 
womanly and deep ? Is it to have faith in God 
like his absolute trust ; a faith in God's person 
and his function too ; a faith in truth, in justice, 
in holiness, and love ; a faith in God as Cause 
and Providence, in man as the effect and child of 
God ? Is it the end of laymen and clergymen 
to produce such a religion, — to build up and 
multiply Christians of that manly sort? 

Compliance with forms is made the test of piety, 
its indispensable condition. These forms are com- 
monly twofold : liturgical, — compliance with the 
ritual ; dogmatical, — compliance with the creed. 
It is not shown that the rite has a universal, natu- 
ral connection with piety ; only that it was once 



340 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

actually connected with a pious man. Nobody 
thinks that circumcision, baptism, or taking the 
Lord's supper, has a natural and indispensable 
connection with piety; only it is maintained that 
these things have been practised by pious men, 
and are imposed on others by their authority. It 
is not shown that the creed has its foundation in 
the nature of man, still less in the nature of God ; 
only that it rested once in the consciousness of 
some pious man, and has also been imposed on 
us by authority. So, it is not shown that these 
tests have any natural connection with religion ; 
only that they once had an historical connection; 
and that, of course, was either temporary, natu- 
rally ending with the stage of civilization which it 
belonged to, or even personal, peculiar to the man 
it begun with. 

Yet it is remarkable how much those temporary 
or mere personal expedients are set up as indis- 
pensable conditions and exclusive tests of piety. 
The Catholic Church, on the whole, is an excel- 
lent institution ; Christendom could no more do 
without it, than Europe dispense with monar- 
chies; but the steadfast Catholic must say, " Out 
of the Church there is no piety, no religion be- 
yond the Church's ritual and creed." The Prot- 
estant churches are, on the whole, an excellent 
institution ; Christendom could no more dispense 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 341 

with them, than New England with her common 
schools ; but the steadfast Protestant will say, 
" There can be no piety without accepting the 
Bible as the word of God, no saving religion with- 
out faith in the letter of Scripture." Not only has 
the Catholic his Shibboleth, and the Protestant 
his, but each sect its own. The Calvinist says, 
" There is no piety without a belief in the Trinity." 
The Unitarians say, " There is no piety without 
a belief in the miracles of the New Testament." 
The Jews require a knowledge of Moses; Ma- 
hometans, a reverence for their prophet; and 
Christians, in general, agree there is no " saving 
piety" without submissive reverence to Christ. 
The late Dr. Arnold, a most enlightened and relig- 
ious man, declared that he had no knowledge of 
God except as manifested through Jesus Christ. 
Yet all the wide world over, everywhere, men 
know of God and worship Him, — the savage 
fearing, while the enlightened learns to love. 

Since compliance with the ritual and the creed 
is made the sole and exclusive test of piety, relig- 
ious teachers aim to produce this compliance in 
both kinds, and, succeeding therein, are satisfied 
that piety dwells in their disciples' heart. But the 
ritual compliance may be purely artificial ; not 
something which grows out of the man, but sticks 
on. The compliance with the doctrine may be 

29* 



342 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS, 

apparent, and not real at all. The word belief is 
taken in a good many senses. It does not always 
mean a total experience of the doctrine, a realiz- 
ing sense thereof; not always an intellectual con- 
viction, They often are the best believers of the 
creed who have the least experience in the love of 
God. but little intellect, and have made no investi- 
gation of the matter credited. Belief often means 
only that the believer does not openly reject the 
doctrine he is said to hold. So the thing thus 
believed is not always a new branch growing: out 
of the old bole ; nor is it a foreign scion grafted in. 
and living out of the old stock, as much at home 
as if a native there, and bearing fruit after its 
better kind ; it is merely stuck into the bark of 
the old tree, — nay, often not even that, but only 
lodged in the branches. — fruitless, leafless, life- 
less, as dry as a stick. — a deformity, and with- 
out use. 

In this way it comes to pass that compliance 
with the rite, and belief in a doctrine, which in 
some men were the result of a long life of piety 
and hard straggle, actually mean nothing at all. 
So that the ritual and the creed have no more 
effect in promoting the i; convert's " piety and 
morality, than would belief in the multiplication- 
table and the habit of saying it over. You are 
surprised that the doctrines of Christ do not affect 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 343 

the Christian, and ceremonies which once revolu- 
tionized the heart they were bom in, now leave 
the worshipper as cold as the stone beneath his 
knee. Be not astonished at the result. The mar- 
ble does not feel the commandments which are 
graven there ; the communion chalice never tastes 
the consecrated wine. The marble and the metal 
are only mechanical in their action ; it was not 
meant that they should taste or feel. 

Then piety, as a sentiment, is taken as the whole 
of religion ; its end is in itself. The tests, liturgi- 
cal or dogmatic, show that piety is in the man; 
all he has next to do is to increase the quan- 
tity. The proof of that increase is a greatening 
of love for the form and for the doctrine ; the habit 
of dawdling about the one and talking about the 
other. The sentiment of religion is allowed to 
continue a sentiment, and nothing more ; soon 
it becomes less, a sentimentalism, a sickly senti- 
ment which will never beget a deed. 

It is a good thing to get up pious feeling; there 
is no danger we shall have too much of that. But 
the feeling should lead to a thought, the thought 
to a deed, else it is of small value ; at any rate, it 
does not do all of its work for the individual, and 
nothing for any one beside. This religious senti- 
mentality is called Mysticism or Pietism, in the 
bad sense of those two words. In most of the 



344 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

churches which have a serious purpose, and are 
not content with the mere routine of office, it is a 
part of the pastor's aim to produce piety, the love 
of God. That is right, for piety, in its wide sense, 
is the foundation of all manly excellence. Bat in 
general they seem to know only these liturgical 
and dogmatic tests of piety; hence they aim to 
have piety put in that conventional form, and re- 
ject with scorn all other and natural modes of ex- 
pressing love to God. 

It is a good thing to aim to produce piety, a 
great good ; an evil, to limit it in this way ; a great 
evil, not to leave it free to take its natural form ; a 
very great evil, to keep it in doors so long, that it 
becomes sick and good for nothing, not daring to 
go out at all. 

It is remarkable how often ecclesiastical men 
make this mistake. They judge a man to be re- 
ligious or otherwise, solely by this test. You hear 
strict ministers speak of a layman a*s an " amiable 
man," but "not pious." They do not know that 
amiableness is one form of natural piety, and that 
the more piety a man gets, the more amiable he 
becomes. The piety which they know has no con- 
nection with honesty, none with friendship, none 
with philanthropy ; its only relations are with 
the ritual and creed. When the late John Quincy 
Adams died, his piety was one topic of commen- 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 345 



dation in most of the many sermons preached in 
memory of the man. What was the proof or sign 
of that piety ? Scarcely any one found it in his 
integrity, which had not failed for many a year; 
or his faithful attendance on his political duty ; or 
his unflinching love of liberty, and the noble war 
the aged champion fought for the unalienable 
rights of man. No ! They found the test in the 
fact that he was a member of a church ; that he 
went to meeting, and was more decorous than 
most men while there ; that he daily read the 
Bible, and repeated each night a simple and beau- 
tiful little prayer, which mothers teach their babes 
of grace. No regular minister, I think, found the 
proof of his piety in his zeal for man's welfare, in 
the cleanness of his life, and hands which never 
took a bribe. One, I remember, found a sign of 
that piety in the fact, that he never covered his 
reverend head till fairly out of church ! 

You remember the Orthodox judgment on Dr. 
Channing. Soon after his death, it was declared 
in a leading Trinitarian journal of America, that 
without doubt he had gone to a place of torment, 
to expiate the sin of denying the Deity of Christ. 
All the noble life of that great and good and lov- 
ing man was not thought equal to the formal be- 
lief, that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Jehovah 
of the Psalms. 



346 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

After ecclesiastical men produce their piety, they 
do not aim to set it to do the natural work of man- 
kind. Morality is not thought to be the proof of 
piety, nor even the sign of it. They dam up the 
stream of human nature till they have got a suffi- 
cient head of piety, and then, instead of setting it 
to turn the useful mill of life, or even drawing 
it off to water the world's dry grounds, they let 
the waters run over the dam, promoting nothing 
but sectarian froth and noise ; or, if it be allowed 
to turn the wheels, it must not grind sound corn 
for human bread, but chiefly rattle the clapper of 
the theologic mill. 

The most serious sects in America now and 
then have a revival. The aim is to produce piet- 
ism ; but commonly you do not find the subjects 
of a revival more disposed to morality after that 
than before ; it is but seldom they are better sons 
or more loving lovers, partners or parents more 
faithful than before. It is only the ritual and the 
creed which they love the better. Intelligent men 
of the serious sects will tell you, such revivals do 
more harm than good, because the feelings are ex- 
cited unnaturally, and then not directed to their 
appropriate, useful work. 

The most important actual business of the cler- 
gy is, first, to keep up the present amount of 
morality. All sects agree in that work, and do 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 347 



a service by the attempt. For there are always 
sluggish men, slumberers, who need to be awaked, 
loiterers, who must be called out to, and hurried 
forward. Next, it is to produce piety, try it by 
these tests, and put it into these forms. All sects 
likewise agree in that, and therein they do good, 
and a great good. But after the piety is pro- 
duced, it is not wholly natural piety, nor do they 
aim to apply it to the natural work thereof. 

Such is the most important business of the pul- 
pit, — almost its only business. Hence unpopu- 
lar vices, vices below the average virtue of society, 
get abundantly preached at. And popular virtues, 
virtues up to the average of society, get abun- 
dantly praised. But popular vices go umvhipped, 
and unpopular virtues all unhonored pass the pul- 
pit by. The great Dagon of the popular idolatry 
stands there in the market-place, to receive the 
servile and corrupting homage of the crowd, dash- 
ing the little ones to ruin at his feet ; the popular 
priest is busy with his Philistine pietism, and never 
tells the people that it is an idol, and not God, 
which they adore. It is not his function to do that. 
Hence a man of more than the average excellence, 
more than the average wisdom, justice, philan- 
thropy, or faith in God, and resolutely bent on 
promoting piety and morality in all their forms, 
is thought out of place in a sectarian pulpit; and 



348 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS, 



is just as much out of place there, as a Unitarian 
would be in a Trinitarian pulpit, or a Calvinist 
in a Unitarian, — as much so as a weaver of 
broadcloth would be in a mill for making ribbons 
or gauze. 

Hence, too, it comes to pass, that it is not 
thought fit to attack popular errors in the pulpit, 
nor speak of wide-spread public sins ; not even to 
expose the fault of your own denomination to it- 
self. The sins of Unitarians may be preached at 
only in Trinitarian pulpits. It is not lawful for 
a sect to be instructed by a friend. The sins of 
commerce must not be rebuked in a trading town. 
In time of war we must not plead for peace. The 
sins of politics the minister must never touch. 
Why not ? Because they are actual sins of the 
times, and his kingdom " is not of this world." 
Decorous ministers are ordained and appointed to 
apologize for respectable iniquity, and to eulogize 
every wicked, but popular, great man. So long as 
the public sepulchres may not be cleansed, there 
must be priestly Pharisees to wash their outside 
white. The Northern priest is paid to consecrate 
the tyranny of capital, as the Southern to conse- 
crate the despotism of the master over his negro 
slave. Men say you must not touch the actual 
sins of the times in a pulpit, — it would hurt 
men's feelings ; and they must not be disquieted 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 349 



from their decorous, their solemn, their accus- 
tomed sleep. "You must preach the Gospel, young 
fanatic." quoth the world. And that means preach- 
ing the common doctrines so as to convict no 
man's conscience of any actual sin ; then press out 
a little pietism, and decant it off into the old bot- 
tles of the Church. 

The late Mr. Polk affords a melancholy exam- 
ple of the effect of this mode of proceeding. On 
his death-bed, when a man ought to have nothing 
to do but to die, the poor man remembers that he 
has not been baptized, wishes to know if there is 
any " hope" for him, receives the dispensation of 
water in the usual form, and is thought to die a 
Christian. "What a sad sign of the state of relig- 
ion amongst us! To him or to his advisers it did 
not seem to occur, that, if we live right, it is of 
small consequenee how we die ; that a life full of 
duties is the real baptism in the name of man 
and God, and the sign of the Holy Spirit. The 
churches never taught him so. But snivelling at 
the end is not a Christian and a manly death. 

The effect of getting up the feeling of piety, and 
stopping with that, is like the effect of reading 
novels and nothing else. Thereby the feelings of 
benevolence, of piety, of hope, of joy, are excited, 
but lead to no acts ; the character becomes ener- 
vated, the mind feeble, the conscience inert, the 

30 



350 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



will impotent; the heart, long wont to weep at 
the novelist's unreal woes, at sorrows in silk and 
fine linen, is harder than Pharaoh's when a dirty 
Irish girl asks for a loaf in the dear name of God, 
or when a sable mother begs money wherewith 
to save her daughter from the seraglios of New 
Orleans. Self-denial for the sake of noble enter- 
prise is quite impossible to such. All the great 
feelings naturally lead to commensurate deeds ; to 
excite the feeling and leave undone the deed, is 
baneful in the extreme. 

I do not say novels are not good reading and 
profitable ; they are so, just so far as they stimulate 
the intellect, the conscience, the affections, the soul, 
to healthful action, and set the man to work ; but 
just so far as they make you content with your 
feeling, and constrain the feeling to be nothing 
but feeling, they are pernicious. Such reading is 
mental dissipation. To excite the devotional feel- 
ings, to produce a great love of God, and not 
allow that to become work, is likewise dissipa- 
tion all the more pernicious, — dissipation of the 
conscience, of the soul. I do not say it comes in 
the name of self-indulgence, as the other; it is often 
begun in the name of self-denial, and achieved at 
great cost of self-denial, too. 

Profligacy of the religious sentiment, voluptu- 
ousness with God, is the most dangerous of luxu- 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 351 



ries. Novel-reading, after the fashion hinted at, 
is highly dangerous. How many youths and 
maidens are seriously hurt thereby ! But as far 
as I can judge, in all Christendom there are more 
that suffer from this spiritual dissoluteness. I 
speak less to censure than to warn. I hate to see 
a man uncharitable, dishonest, selfish, mean, and 
sly, — "for ever standing on his guard and watch- 
ing " unto fraud. I am sorry to hear of a woman 
given up to self-indulgence, accomplished, but with- 
out the highest grace, — womanly good works, — 
luxurious, indolent, " born to consume the corn," — - 
that is bad enough. But when I learn that this 
hard man is a class leader, and has "the gift of 
prayer," is a famous hand at a conference, the 
builder of churches, a great defender of ecclesiasti- 
cal doctrines and devotional forms, that he cries 
out upon every heresy, banning men in the name 
of God ; when I hear that this luxurious woman 
delights in mystic devotion, and has a wantonness 
of prayer, — it makes me far more sad ; and there 
is then no hope ! The kidnapper at his court is 
a loathly thing ; but the same kidnapper at his 
communion ! — great God ! and has thy Church 
become so low! Let us turn off our eyes and 
look away. 

Hence it comes to pass, that much of all this 
ecclesiastic pains to produce piety is abortive ; it 



352 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



ends in sickness and routine. Men who have the 
reputation of piety in a vulgar sense are the last 
men you would look to in any great good work. 
They will not oppose slavery and war and lust of 
land, — national sins that are popular ; nor intem- 
perance and excessive love of gold, — popular, per- 
sonal, and social sins. They would not promote 
the public education of the people, and care not 
to raise woman to her natural equality with man. 
" It is no part of piety to do such things/' say 
they ; " we are not under the covenant of works, 
but of grace only. What care we for painful per- 
sonal righteousness, which profiteth little, when 
only the imputed can save us, and that so swiftly ! " 

Nay, they hinder all these great works. The 
bitterest opposition to the elevation of all men is 
made in the name of devotion; so is the defence 
of slavery and war, and the Hat degradation of 
woman. Here is a church, which at a public 
meeting solemnly instructs its minister elect not 
to preach on politics, or on the subjects of reform. 
They want him to " preach piety," " nothing but 
piety," " evangelical piety"; not a week-day piety, 
but a Sabbath piety, which is up and at church 
once in seven days, — keeps her pew of a Sun- 
day, but her bed all the week, — ghastly, lean, dys- 
peptic, coughing, bowed together, and in no wise 
able to lift up herself. 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 353 



Hence " piety " gets a bad reputation amongst 
philanthropists, as it serves to hinder the develop- 
ment of humanity. Even amongst men of busi- 
ness a reputation for " piety " would make a new- 
comer distrusted ; the money-lender would look 
more carefully to his collateral security. 

At Blenheim and at Windsor you will find 
clipped yew-trees, cut into the shape of hearts and 
diamonds, nay, of lions and eagles, looking like any 
thing but trees. So in Boston, in all New Eng- 
land, everywhere in Christendom, you find clipped 
men, their piety cut into various artificial forms, 
looking like any thing but men. The saints of the 
popular theology, what are they good for? For 
belief and routine, — for all of religion save only 
real piety and morality. 

Persons of this stamp continually disappoint 
us. You expect manly work, and cannot get it 
done. Did you ever see little children play " Mon- 
ey " ? They clasp their hands together and strike 
them gently on their knee ; the elastic air com- 
pressed by this motion sounds like the jingling of 
small silver coin. You open the hand : there is 
nothing in it, — not small money enough to buy a 
last year's walnut or a blueberry. It was only 
the jingle of the money, — all of money but the 
money's worth. So is this unnatural form of 
piety ; it has the jingle of godliness, and seems just 

30* 



354 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

as good as real piety, until you come to spend it ; 
then it is good for nothing, — it will not pass any- 
where amongst active men. A handful of it comes 
to nothing. Alas me ! the children play at " Mon- 
ey," and call it sport ; men grown play with a 
similar delusion, and call it the worship of God. 

Now there is much of this false piety in the 
world, produced by this false notion, that there are 
only these two tests of piety. It leads to a great 
deal of mischief. Men are deceived who look to 
you for work ; you yourself are deceived in hoping 
for peace, beauty, comfort and gladness, from such 
a deception. 

" So, floating down a languid stream. 
The lily-leaves oft lilies seem, 
Reflecting back the whitened beam 

Of morning's slanting sun : — 
But as I near and nearer came, 
I missed the lily's fragrant flame, — 

The gay deceit was done. 
No snow-white lily blossomed fair, 
There came no perfume on the air ; 
Only an idle leaf lay there, 

And wantoned in the sun." 

Under these circumstances, piety dies away till 
there is nothing left but the name and the form. 
There is the ritual, the belief, such as it is, but 
nothing else. It is the symbol of narrowness and 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 355 



bigotry, often of self-conceit, sometimes of envy 
and malice and all uncharitableness. It leads to 
no outward work, it produces no inward satisfac- 
tion, no harmony with yourself, no concord with 
your brother, no unity with God. It leads to no 
real and natural tranquillity, no income of the 
Holy Spirit, no access of new being, no rest in 
God. There is the form of godliness, and nothing 
of its power. Some earnest-minded men see this, 
and are disgusted with all that bears the name of 
religion. Do you wonder at this ? Remove the 
cause, as well as blame the consequence. 

If pains be taken to cultivate piety, and, as it 
grows up, if it be left to its own natural develop- 
ment, it will have its own form of manifestation. 
The feeling of love to God, the Infinite Object, will 
not continue a mere feeling. Directed to the Infi- 
nite Object, it will be directed also towards men, 
and become a deed. As you love God the more, 
you must also love men the more, and so must 
serve them better. Your prayer will not content 
you, though beautiful as David's loftiest psalm ; 
you must put it into a practice more lovely yet. 
Then your prayer will help you, your piety be a 
real motive, a perpetual blessing. It will increase 
continually, rising as prayer to come down again 



356 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



as practice, — will first raise "a mortal to the skies.' 5 
then draw that angel down. So the water which 
rises in electric ecstasy to heaven, and gleams in 
the rising or descending sun, comes down as 
simple dew and rain, to quiet the dust in the com- 
mon road, to cool the pavement of the heated 
town, to wash away the unhealthiness of city 
lanes, and nurse the common grass which feeds 
the horses and the kine. 

At the beginning of your growth in piety, there 
is, doubtless, need of forms, of special time and 
place. There need not be another's form, or there 
may be, just as you like. The girl learning to 
write imitates carefully each mark on the copy, 
thinking of the rules for holding the pen. But as 
you grow, you think less of the form, of the sub- 
stance more. So the pen becomes not a mere 
instrument, but almost a limb ; the letters are 
formed even without a thought. Without the 
form, you have the effect thereof. 

If there be piety in the heart, and it be allowed 
to live and grow and attain its manly form, it will 
quicken every noble faculty in man. Morality 
will not be dry, and charity will not be cold ; the 
reason will not grovel with mere ideas, nor the 
understanding with calculations ; the shaft of wit 
will lose its poison, merriment its levity, com- 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 357 

mon life its tedium. Disappointment, sorrow, 
suffering, will not break the heart, which will find 
soothing and comfort in its saddest woe. The 
consciousness of error, which vexes oft the noble 
soul, will find some compensation for its grief. Re- 
morse, which wounds men so sadly and so sore, will 
leave us the sweetest honey, gleaned up from the 
flowers we trod upon when we should have gath- 
ered their richness, and happily will sting us out 
of our offence. 

The common test of Christianity is not the 
natural sacrament; it is only this poor convention- 
al thing. Look at this. The land is full of Bibles. 
I am glad of it. I am no worshipper of the Bible, 
yet I reverence its wisdom, I honor its beauty of 
holiness, and love exceedingly the tranquil trust 
in God which its great authors had. Some of the 
best things that I have ever learned from man this 
book has taught me. Think of the great souls in 
this Hebrew Old Testament ; of the two great 
men in the New, — Jesus, who made the great re- 
ligious motion in the world's parliament, and Paul, 
who supported it ! I am glad the Bible goes every- 
where. But men take it for master, not for help ; 
read it as a sacrament, not to get a wiser and a 
higher light. They worship its letter, and the bet- 
ter spirit of Moses, of Esaias, of the Holy Psalms, 



358 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 

so old and yet so young, so everlasting in their 
beauteous faith in God, — the sublime spirit of one 
greater than the temple, and lord of the Sabbath, 
who scorned to put the new wine of God into the 
old and rotten bags of men — that is not in Chris- 
tendom. O, no ! men do not ask for that. The 
yeasty soul would rend asunder tradition's leath- 
ern bags. Worship of Bibles never made men 
write Bibles ; it hinders us from living them. 
Worship no things for that; not the created, 
but, O Creator! let us worship Thee. Catholi- 
cism is worship of a Church, instead of God ; Prot- 
estantism is worship of a book. Both could not 
generate a Jesus or a Moses. 

For proof of religion men appeal to our church- 
es, built by the self-denial of hard-working men. 
They prove nothing, — nay, nothing at all. The 
polygamous Mormons far outdo the Christians in 
their zeal. The throng of men attending church 
is small proof of religion. Think of the vain 
things which lead men to this church or to that ; 
of the vain thoughts which fill them there ; of the 
vain words they hear, or which are only spoke, 
not even heard ! What a small amount of real 
piety and real morality is needed to make up a 
popular Christian ! Alas ! we have set up an 
artificial sacrament ; we comply with that, then call 
ourselves religious, — yea, Christians. We try 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS.. 359 

ecclesiastic metal by its brassy look and brassy 
ring, then stamp it with the popular image of our 
idolatry, and it passes current in the shop, tribute 
fit for Caesar. The humble publican of the para- 
ble, not daring to lift up his eyes to heaven ; the 
poor widow, with her two mites that made a far- 
thing; the outcast Samaritan, with his way-side 
benevolence to him that fell among the thieves, 
— might shame forth from the Christian Church 
each Pharisee who drops his minted and his jin- 
gling piety, with brassy noise, into the public chest. 
Render unto Caesar the things that be Caesar's. 

The real test of religion is its natural sacra- 
ment, — is life. To know whom you worship, let 
me see you in your shop, let me overhear you 
in your trade ; let me know how you rent your 
houses, how you get your money, how you keep 
it, or how it is spent. It is easy to pass the Sun- 
day idle, idly lounging in the twilight of idle words, 
or basking in the sunshine of some strong man's 
most earnest speech. It is easy to repeat the 
words of David, or of Jesus, and to call it prayer. 
But the sacramental test of your religion is not 
your Sunday idly spent, not the words of David 
or of Jesus that you repeat ; it is your week-day 
life, your works, and not your words. Tried by 
this natural test, the Americans are a heathen peo- 
ple, not religious ; far, far from that. Compare 



360 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 



us with the Chinese by the artificial standard of 
the missionary, we are immensely above them ; 
by the natural sacrament of obedience to the law 
of God, how much is the Christian before the 
heathen man? 

The national test of religion is the nation's jus- 
tice, — justice to other states abroad, the strong, 
the weak, and justice to all sorts of men at home. 
The law-book is the nation's creed ; the news- 
papers chant the actual liturgy and service of 
the day. What avails it that the priest calls 
us " Christian," while the newspapers and the 
Congress prove us infidel ? The social sacra- 
ment of religion is justice to all about you in 
society, — is honesty in trade and work, is friend- 
ship and philanthropy ; the religious strong must 
help the weak. The ecclesiastical sacrament of a 
church must be its effort to promote piety and 
goodness in its own members first, and then to 
spread it round the world. Care for the bodies and 
the souls of men, that is the real sacrament and 
ordinance of religion for society, the Church and 
State. 

For the individual man, for you and me, there 
are two great natural sacraments. One is inward 
and not directly seen, save by the eye of God and 
by your own, — the continual effort, the great life- 
long act of prayer to be a man, with a man's 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 361 



body and a man's spirit, doing a man's duties, 
having a man's rights, and thereby enjoying the 
welfare of a man. That is one, — the internal or- 
dinance of religion. The other is like it, — the 
earnest attempt to embody this in outward life, 
to make the manly act of prayer a manly act of 
practice too. These are the only sacraments for 
the only worship of the only God. Let me under- 
value no means of growth, no hope of glory ; these 
are the ends of growth, the glory which men hope. 

Is not all this true ? You and I, — ■ we all 
know it. There is but one religion, natural and 
revealed by nature, — by outward nature poorly 
and in hints, but by man's inward spirit copiously 
and at large. It is piety in your prayer ; in your 
practice it is morality. But try the nations, socie- 
ty, the Church, persons, by this sacramental test, 
and what a spectacle we are ! For the religion 
of the state, study the ends and actions of the 
state ; study the religion of the Church by the 
doctrines and the practice of the Church ; the re- 
ligion of society, — read it in the great cities of the 
land. " Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done," 
prays the minister. Listen to the " Amen " of the 
courts and the market, responding all the week! 
The actual religion of mankind is always summed 
up in the most conspicuous men. Is that religion 
Christian ? Spirit of the Crucified! how we take 

31 



362 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS, 



thy honored name in vain ! Yet we did not mean 
to be led astray : the nations did not mean it ; the 
cities meant it not; the churches prayed for better 
things ; the chief men stumbled and fell. We have 
altogether mistaken the ordinance of religion, and 
must mend that. 

The New England Indian insisted upon his 
poor, hungry sacrament ; so did the barbarian 
German ; so the Jew, the Catholic, the Protestant ; 
and each sectarian has his Shibboleth of ritual 
and creed. How poor and puerile are all these 
things! How puerile and poor the idea of God 
asking such trifles of mortal man ! We shall 
never mend matters till we take the real religious 
sacrament, scorning to be deluded longer by such 
idle shows. 

Now it has come to such a pass, that men wish 
to limit all religion to their artificial sacraments. 
The natural ordinance of human piety must not 
be even commended in the church. You must 
not apply religion to politics ; it makes men mad. 
There is no law of God above the written laws of 
men. You must not apply it to trade : business 
is business ; religion is religion. Business has 
the week for his time, the world for his market- 
place ; religion has her Sunday and her meeting- 
house ; let each pursue his own affairs. So the 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 363 

minister must not expose the sins of trade nor the 
sins of politics. Then, too, public opinion must 
be equally free from the incursions of piety. " O 
Religion ! " say men, " be busy with thy sacra- 
mental creeds, thy sacramental rites, thy crumb of 
bread, thy sip of wine, thy thimbleful of water 
sprinkled on a baby's face, but leave the state, the 
market,, and all men, to serve the Devil, and be 
lost." " Very well," says the priest, " I accept the 
condition. Come and take our blessed religion!" 

I began by saying how beautiful is real piety; 
so let me end. I love to study this in the forms of 
the past, in the mystic forms of Thomas a Kempis 
and William Law, in Fenelon and Swedenborg, 
in John Tauler, in St. Bernard and St. Victor, in 
Taylor and Herbert. But there it appears not in 
its fairest form. I love to see piety at its work 
better than in its play or its repose ; in philanthro- 
pists better than in monks and nuns, who gave 
their lives to contemplation and to wordy prayer, 
and their bodies to be burned. I love piety em- 
bodied in a Gothic or Roman cathedral, an artistic 
prayer in stone, but better in a nation well fed, 
well housed, well clad, instructed well, a natural 
prayer in man or woman. I love the water touched 
by electric fire, and stealing upwards to the sky, 
lovely in the light of the uprising or slowly sinking 



364 CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS* 



sun. I love it not the less descending down as 
dew and rain, to still the dust in all the country 
roads, to cool the pavement in the heated town, 
to wash the city's dirtiest lane, and in the fields 
giving grass to the cattle, and bread to men. 
What is so fair as sentiment, is lovelier as life. 

All the triumphs of ancient piety are for you 
and me ; the lofty sentiment, the high resolve, the 
vision filled with justice, beauty, truth, and love. 
The great, ascending prayer, the manly conscious- 
ness of God, his income to your soul as justice, 
beauty, truth and faith and love, — all these wait 
there for you, — happiness now and here ; hereafter 
the certain blessedness which cannot pass away. 

Piety is beautiful in all; to a great man it comes 
as age comes to the Parthenon or the Pyramids, 
making what was vast and high majestic, vener- 
able, sublime, and to their beauty giving a solemn 
awe they never knew before. To men not great, 
to the commonest men, it also comes, bringing 
refinement and a loveliness of substance and of 
shape ; so that in a vulgar ecclesiastic crowd they 
seem like sculptured gems of beryl and of emerald 
among the common pebbles of the sea. 

Piety is beautiful in all relations of life. When 
your wooing, winsome soul shall wed the won to 
be your other and superior self, a conscious piety 
hallows and beautifies the matrimonial vow, — 



CONVENTIONAL AND NATURAL SACRAMENTS. 365 



deepens and sanctifies connubial love. When a 
new soul is added to your household, — a new 
rose-bud to your bosom, — a bright, particular star 
dropped from the upper sphere and dazzling in 
your diadem, — your conscious love of God will 
give the heavenly visitant the truest, the most 
prophetic and most blessed baptismal welcome 
here. And when, out of the circle that twines 
you round with loving hearts beloved, some one is 
taken, born out of your family, not into it, a con- 
scious piety will seem to send celestial baptism to 
the heaven-born soul. And when the mists of age 
gather about your eye, when the silver cord of life 
is loosed and the golden bowl at the fountain 
begins to break, with what a blessed triumph 
shall you close your mortal sense to this romantic 
moon and this majestic sun, to the stars of earth 
that bloom below, the starry flowers that burn 
above, to open your soul on glory which the eye 
has not seen, nor yet the heart of man been com- 
petent to dream ! 

" Thy sweetness hath betrayed Thee, Lord ! 
Dear Spirit ! it is Thou ; 
Deeper and deeper in my heart 
I feel Thee nestling now ! 

" Dear Comforter ! Eternal Love ! 
Yes, Thou wilt stay with me, 
If manly thoughts and loving ways 
Build but a nest for Thee I " 
31 * 



X. 



OF COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



THE COMMUNION OF THE HOLY GHOST BE WITH YOU ALL. — 

2 Cor. xiii. 14. 

Simeon the Stylite lived on the top of the pillar 
at Antioch for seven-and-thirty years, for the sake 
of being nearer to God and holding communion 
with Him. Some men shut themselves up in 
convents and nunneries under vows of perpetual 
asceticism, thinking that God will come into the 
soul the easier if the flesh be worn thin, the body 
looped and windowed with bad usage and unnat- 
ural hard fare. All the monasteries are designed 
to produce communion with God. " He dwells," 
say the priests, a not in the broad way and the 
green, but in the stillness of the cloister." All the 
churches in Christendom are built to promote ac- 
cess to Him in various forms. " This is the gate 
of heaven," says the priest, of his church. All 
the ritual services are for this end; — to draw 7 God 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



367 



down to men, or draw men up to God ; or to 
appease His "wrath." So also are the mosques 
of the Mahometans, the synagogues of the Jews, 
and all the temples of the world. The Pyramids 
of Egypt, the Parthenon at Athens, St. Peter's at 
Rome, the Mormon temple at Nauvoo, — all are 
but the arms of man artificially lengthened and 
reached out to grasp the Holy Ghost, enfold it to 
the human heart, and commune with it, soul to 
soul. The little hymn which a mother teaches 
her child, cradled on her knee, the solemn litany 
which England pays her thousand priests to chant 
each day in every cathedral of the land, — all are 
for the same end, to promote communion with 
God. For this the Quaker sits silent in his un- 
adorned meeting-house waiting for the Spirit, lying 
low in the hand of God to receive His inspiration. 
For this you and I lift up our hearts in silent or 
unspoken prayer. The petition for this commun- 
ion is common to the enlightened of all man- 
kind. It may ascend equally from Catholic or 
Quaker, from bond and free, from Hebrew, Budd- 
hist, Christian, Mahometan, — from all who have 
any considerable growth of soul. 

I love to look at common life, business and 
politics, from the stand-point of religion, and hence 
am thought to be hard upon the sins of the state 



36S 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



and the sins of business, trying all things by the 
higher law of God. But if religion is good for any 
thing, it is as a rule of conduct for daily life, in the 
business of the individual and the business of the 
nation. It is poor policy and bad business that 
cannot bear to be looked at in the light that light- 
eneth every man, and tried by the divine measure 
of all things. It is a poor clock that will not keep 
the time of the universe. 

I love to look at philosophy — science and 
metaphysics — from the stand-point of religion, 
and see how the conclusions of the intellect square 
with the natural instincts of the heart and soul. 
Then I love to change places, and look at religion 
and all the spontaneous instincts of the soul, with 
the eye of the intellect, from the stand-point of 
philosophy. Hence I am thought to to be hard 
upon the Church; amiable enough toward natural, 
human religion, but cruel toward revealed, divine 
theology. Yet if the intellect is good for any 
thing, it is good to try the foundations of religion 
with. The mind is the eye of consciousness. It 
is a poor doctrine that cannot bear to be looked 
at in the dry light of reason. Let us look hard 
and dry at this notion of communion with God, 
and by reason severely ascertain if there be such a 
thing ; what it is ; how it is to be had : and what 
comes thereof. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



369 



There must be such a thing as communion 
between God and man. I mean, defining that 
provisionally, there must be a giving on God's 
part, and a taking on man's part. To state the 
matter thus is to make it evident, — since it fol- 
lows from the nature of God; for from the neces- 
sity of his nature the Infinite Being must create 
and preserve the finite, and to the finite must, in 
its forms, give and communicate of his own kind. 
It is according to the infinite nature of God to 
do so ; as according to the finite nature of light 
to shine, of fire to burn, of water to wet. It fol- 
lows as well from the nature of man as finite and 
derivative. From the necessity of his nature, he 
must receive existence and the means of continu- 
ance. He must get all his primitive power, which 
he starts with, and all his materials for secondary 
and automatic growth, from the Primitive and In- 
finite Source. The mode of man's finite being is 
of necessity a receiving; of God's infinite being, 
of necessity a giving. You cannot conceive of 
any finite thing existing without God, the Infi- 
nite basis and ground thereof; nor of God exist- 
ing without something. God is the necessary 
logical condition of a world, its necessitating 
cause ; a world, the necessary logical condition of 
God, his necessitated consequence. Communion 
between the two is a mutual necessity of nature, 



370 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



on God's part and on man's part. I mean it 
is according to the infinite perfection of God's 
nature to create, and so objectify Himself, and 
then preserve and bless whatever He creates. 
So by His nature He creates, preserves, and gives. 
And it is according to the finite nature of man to 
take. So by his nature, soon as created, he de- 
pends and receives, and is preserved only by re- 
ceiving from the Infinite Source. 

That is the conclusion of modern metaphysical 
science. The stream of philosophy runs down from 
Aristotle to Hegel and Hickok, and breaks off with 
this conclusion ; and I see not how it can be gain- 
said. The statements are apodictic, self-evident 
at every step. 

All that is painfully abstract; let me make it 
plainer if I can, — at least shoot one shaft more at 
the same mark from the other side. You start with 
yourself, with nothing but yourself. You are con- 
scious of yourself; not of yourself perhaps as sub- 
stance, surely as power to be, to do, to suffer. But 
you are conscious of yourself not as self-originated 
at all, or as self-sustained alone ; only as depend- 
ent, — first for existence, ever since for support. 

You take the primary ideas of consciousness 
which are inseparable from it, the atoms of self- 
consciousness ; amongst them you find the idea of 
God. Carefully examined by the scrutinizing in- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



371 



tellect, it is the idea of God as Infinite, — perfectly- 
powerful, wise, just, loving, holy, — absolute being, 
with no limitation. It is this which made you, 
made all ; sustains you, sustains all ; made your 
body, not by a single act, but by a series of acts 
extending over millions of years, — for man's body 
is the resultant of all created things ; made your 
spirit, — your mind, your conscience, your affec- 
tions, your soul, your will ; appointed for each its 
natural mode of action ; set each its several aim. 
Self-consciousness leads you to consciousness of 
God ; at last to consciousness of Infinite God. 
He is the Primitive, whence you are the deriva- 
tive. You must receive, or you could not be a 
finite man ; and He must give, or He could not be 
the Infinite God. Hence the communion is un- 
avoidable, an ontological fact. 

God must be omnipresent in space. There can 
be no mote that peoples the sunbeams, no spot 
on an insect's wing, no little cell of life which the 
microscope discovers in the seed-sporule of a 
moss, and brings to light, but God is there, in the 
mote that peoples the sunbeams, in that spot on 
the insect's wing, in that cell of life the micro- 
scope discovers in the seed-sporule of a moss. 

God must be also omnipresent in time. There 
is no second of time elapsing now, there has been 



372 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



none millions of years ago, before the oldest stars 
began to burn, but God was in that second of 
time. 

Follow the eye of the great space-penetrating 
telescope at Cambridge into the vast halls of crea- 
tion, to the furthest nebulous spot seen in Orion's 
belt. — a spot whose bigness no mortal mind can 
adequately conceive, — and God is there. Follow 
the eye of the great sharply defining microscope 
at Berlin into some corner of creation, to that lit- 
tle dot, one of many millions that people an inch 
of stone, once animate with swarming life, a spot 
too small for mortal mind adequately to conceive, 
— and God is there. 

Get you a metaphysic microscope of time to 
divide a second into its billionth part ; God is in 
that. Get you a metaphysic telescope of time, to 
go back in millenniums as the glass in miles, and 
multiply the duration of a solar system by itself to 
get an immensity of time, — still God is there, in 
each elapsing second of that millennial stream of 
centuries, His Here conterminous with the all of 
space, his Now coeval with the all of time. 

Through all this space, in all this time, His 
Being extends, "spreads undivided, operates un- 
spent " ; God in all his infinity, — perfectly power- 
ful, perfectly wise, perfectly just, perfectly loving 
and holy. His being is an infinite activity, a ere- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



373 



ating, and so a giving of Himself to the world. 
The world's being is a becoming, a being created 
and continued. This is so in the nebula of Ori- 
on's belt, and in the seed-sporule of the smallest 
moss. It is so now, and was the same millions of 
millenniums ago. 

All this is philosophy, the unavoidable conclu- 
sion of the human mind. It is not the opinion of 
Coleridge and Kant, but their science ; not what 
they guess, but what they know. 

In virtue of this immanence of God in matter, 
we say the world is a revelation of God ; its ex- 
istence a show of His. Some good books picture 
to us the shows of things, and report in print the 
whisper of God which men have heard in the ma- 
terial world. They say that God is a good opti- 
cian, — for the eye is a telescope and a microscope, 
the two in one ; that He is a good chemist also, 
ordering all things " by measure and number and 
weight " ; that he is a good mechanic, — for the 
machinery of the world, old as it is, is yet " con- 
structed after the most approved principles of mod- 
ern science." All that is true, but the finite me- 
chanic is not in his work ; he makes it and then 
withdraws. God is in His work, — * 

" As full, as perfect in a hair as heart ; ' : 
" Acts not by partial, but by general laws." 

All nature works from within ; the force that ani- 

32 



374 



COMMUNION WITH GOD, 



mates it is in every part. It was objected to Sir 
Isaac Newton's philosophy, that it makes the 
world all mechanism, which goes without external 
help, and so is a universe without a God ; men 
thinking that He could not work at all in the 
world-machine, unless they saw the Great Hand 
on the crank now and then, or felt the jar of mi- 
raculous interposition when some comet swept 
along the sky. The objection was not just, for 
the manifold action of the universe is only the 
Infinite God's mode of operation. Newton merely 
showed the mode of operation, — that it was con- 
stant and wonderful, not changing and miraculous ; 
and so described a higher mode of operation than 
those men could fathom, or even reverence. 

These things being so, all material things that 
are must needs be in communion with God ; their 
creation was their first passive act of communion ; 
their existence, a continual act of communion. As 
God is infinite, nothing can be without Him, noth- 
ing without communion with Him. The stone I 
sit on is in communion with God; the pencil I 
write with ; the gray field-fly reposing in the sun- 
shine at my foot. Let God withdraw from the 
space occupied by the stone, the pencil, and fly, 
they cease to be. Let Him withdraw any quality 
of his nature therefrom,, and they must cease to be. 
All must partake of Him, immanent in each and 
yet transcending ail. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



375 



In this communion, these and all things receive 
after their kind, according to their degree of being 
and the mode thereof. The mineral, the vegeta- 
ble, and the animal represent three modes of being, 
three degrees of existence ; and hence so many- 
modes and degrees of dependence on God and of 
communion with Him. They are, they grow, they 
move and live, in Him, and by means of Him, and 
only so. But none of these are conscious of this 
communion. In that threefold form of being there 
is no consciousness of God ; they know nothing of 
their dependence and their communion. The wa- 
ter-fowl, in the long pilgrimage of many a thou- 
sand miles, knows naught of Him who teaches its 
way 

" Along that pathless coast, 
The desert and illimitable air." — 

" Lone wandering, but not lost." 

To the dog, man stands for God or devil. The 
"half-reasoning elephant" knows nobody and is 
conscious of nothing higher than his keeper, who 
rides upon his neck, pulling his ears with curved 
hook. All these are ignorant of God. 

We come to man. Here he is, a body and a 
spirit. The vegetable is matter, and something 
more ; the animal is vegetable also, and something 
more ; man is animal likewise, and something 
more. So far as I am matter, a vegetable, an ani- 



376 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



mal, — and I am each in part, — I have the ap- 
propriate communion of the vegetable, the miner- 
al, the animal world. My body, this hand, for 
example, is subject to statical, dynamical, and vital 
laws. God is in this hand ; without his infinite 
existence, its finite existence could not be. It is a 
hand only by its unconscious communion with 
Him. It wills nothing ; it knows nothing ; yet 
all day long, and all the night, each monad there- 
of retains all the primary statical and dynamical 
qualities of matter ; continually the blood runs 
through its arteries and veins, mysteriously form- 
ing this complicated and amazing work. Should 
God withdraw, it were a hand no more ; the blood 
would cease to flow in vein and artery; no monad 
would retain its primary dynamical and static 
powers ; each atom would cease to be. 

All these things, the stone, the pencil, and the 
fly and hand, are but passive and unconscious com- 
municants of God ; they are bare pipes alone into 
which His omnipotence flows. Yes, they are poor, 
brute things, which know Him not, nor cannot 
ever know. The stone and pencil know not them- 
selves ; this marvellous hand knows naught; and 
the fly never says, reasoning with itself, " Lo, 
here am I, an individual and a conscious thing 
sucking the bosom of the world." It never sepa- 
rates the Not-me and the Me. But I am con- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



377 



scious ; I know myself, and through myself know 
God. I am a mind to think, a conscience to per- 
ceive the just and right; I am a heart to love, a 
soul to know of God. For communion with my 
God I have other faculties than what He gives to 
stone and pencil, hand and fly. 

Put together all these things which are not body, 
and call them Spirit: this spirit as a whole is de- 
pendent on God, for creation first, and for exist- 
ence ever since ; it lives only by communion with 
Him. So far as I am a body, I obviously de- 
pend on God, and am no more self-created and 
self-sufficing than the pencil or the fly. So far 
as I am a spirit, I depend equally on Him. Should 
God withdraw Himself or any of His qualities from 
my mind, I could not think; from conscience, I 
should know nothing of the right; from the heart, 
there could be no love ; from the soul, then there 
could be no holiness, no faith in Him that made it. 
Thus the very existence of the spirit is a depend- 
ence on God, and so far a communion with Him. 

I cannot wholly separate my spirit from this 
communion ; for that would be destruction of the 
spirit, annihilation, which is in no man's power. 
Only the Infinite can create or annihilate an atom 
of matter or a monad of spirit. There is a cer- 
tain amount of communion of the spirit with God, 
which is not conscious ; that lies quite beyond my 

32* 



378 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



control. I " break into the bloody house of life," 
and my spirit rashes out of the body, and while 
the static and dynamic laws of nature reassume 
their sway over my material husk, rechanging it to 
dust, still I am, I depend, and so involuntarily 
commune with God. Even the popular theology 
admits this truth, for it teaches that the living 
wicked still commune with God through pain and 
wandering and many a loss ; and that the wicked 
dead commune with Him through hell against 
their will, as with their will the heavenly saints 
through heavenly joy. 

I cannot end this communion with my God ; 
but I can increase it, greaten it largely, if I will. 
The more I live my higher normal life, the more 
do I commune with God. If I live only as mere 
body, I have only corporeal and unconscious com- 
munion, as a mineral, a vegetable, an animal, no 
more. As children, we all begin as low as this. 
The child unborn or newly born has no self-con- 
sciousness, knows nothing of its dependence, its 
spontaneous communion with its God, whereon 
by laws it depends for being and continuance. 
As we outgrow our babyhood we are conscious 
of ourselves, distinguish the Me and the Not-me, 
and learn at length of God. 

I live as spirit, I have spiritual communion with 
God. Depend on Him I must ; when I become 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



379 



self-conscious, I feel that dependence, and know of 
this communion, whereby I receive from Him. 

The quantity of my receipt is largely under my 
control. As I will, I can have less or more. I cul- 
tivate my mind, greatening its quantity; by all its 
growth I have so much more communion with my 
Father; each truth I get is a point common to 
Him and me. I cultivate my conscience, increas- 
ing my moral sense; each atom of justice that I 
get is another point common with the Deity. So 
I cultivate and enlarge my affections ; each grain 
of love — philanthropic or but friendly — is a new 
point common to me and God. Then, too, I culti- 
vate and magnify my soul, greatening my sense 
of holiness, by fidelity to all my nature ; and all 
that I thus acquire is a new point I hold in 
common with the Infinite. I earnestly desire His 
truth, His justice, His holiness and love, and He 
communicates the more. Thus I have a fourfold 
voluntary consciousness of God through my mind 
and conscience, heart and soul ; know Him as the 
absolutely true and just and amiable and holy ; 
and thereby have a fourfold voluntary communion 
with my God. He gives of his infinite kind ; I 
receive in my finite mode, taking according to my 
capacity to receive. 

I may diminish the quantity of this voluntary 
communion. For it is as possible to stint the 



380 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



spirit of its God, as to starve the body of its food ; 
only not to the final degree, — to destruction of the 
spirit. This fact is well known. You would not 
say that Judas had so much and so complete com- 
munion with God as Jesus had. And if Jesus 
had yielded to the temptation in the story, all 
would declare that for the time he must diminish 
the income of God upon his soul. For unfaith- 
fulness in any part lessens the quantity and mars 
the quality of our communion with the Infinite. 

In most various ways men may enlarge the 
power to communicate with God ; complete and 
normal life is the universal instrument thereof. 
Here is a geologist chipping the stones, or study- 
ing the earthquake-waves ; here a metaphysician 
chipping the human mind, studying its curious 
laws, — psychology, logic, ontology ; here is a mer- 
chant, a mechanic, a poet, each diligently using 
his intellectual gift ; and as they acquire the power 
to think, by so much more do they hold intellect- 
ual communion with the thought of God, their 
finite mind communing with the Infinite. My ac- 
tive power of understanding, imagination, reason, 
is the measure of my intellectual communion with 
Him. 

A man strives to know the everlasting right, to 
keep a conscience void of all offence ; his inward 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



381 



eye is pure and single; all is true to the Eternal 
Right. His moral powers continually expand, and 
by so much more does he hold communion with 
his God. As far as it can see, his finite con- 
science reads in the book the Eternal Right of 
God. A man's power of conscience is the meas- 
ure of his moral communion with the Infinite. 

I repress my animal self-love, I learn to be well- 
tempered, disinterested, benevolent, friendly to a 
few, and philanthropic unto all ; my heart is ten 
times greater than ten years ago. To him that 
hath shall be given according to the quantity and 
quality of what he has, and I communicate with 
God so much the more. The greatness of my 
heart is the measure of my affectional communion 
with Him. 

I cultivate the religious faculty within me, keep- 
ing my soul as active as my sense ; I quicken my 
consciousness of the dear God ; I learn to rever- 
ence and trust and love, seeking to keep his every 
rule of conduct for my sense and soul ; I make my 
soul some ten times larger than it was, and just 
as I enhance its quantity and quality so much the 
more do I religiously commune with God. The 
power of my religious sense is the measure of my 
communion with my Father. I feed on this, and 
all the more I take, the more I grow, and still the 
more I need. 



382 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



In all this there is nothing miraculous, nothing 
mysterious, nothing strange. From his mother's 
breast it is the largest child that takes the most. 

At first a man's spiritual communion is very 
little, is most exceeding small ; but in normal 
life it becomes more and more continually. Some 
of you, grown men, can doubtless remember your 
religious experience when you were children. A 
very little manna was food enough for your baby- 
soul. But your character grew more and more, 
your intellectual, moral, and religious life continu- 
ally became greater and greater; when you needed 
much, you had no lack, when little, there seemed 
nothing over ; demand and supply are still com- 
mensurate. Nothing is more under our control 
than the amount of this voluntary communion 
with God. 

" Misfortunes, do the best we can, 
Will come to great and small." 

We cannot help that, but we can progressively 
enlarge the amount of inspiration we receive from 
Heaven, spite of the disappointments and sorrows 
of life ; nay, by means thereof. 

" Thy home is with the humble, Lord i 

The simple are Thy rest ; 
Thy lodging is in childlike hearts, 

Thou makest there Thy nest." 

Sometimes a man makes a conscious and seri- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD, 



383 



ous effort to receive and enlarge this communion. 
He looks over his daily life ; his eye runs back to 
childhood, and takes in ail the main facts of his 
outward and inward history. He sees much to 
mend, something also to approve. Here he erred 
through passion, there sinned by ambition ; the 
desire from within, leagued with opportunity from 
without, making temptation too strong for him, 
He is penitent for the sin that w 7 as voluntary, or 
for the heedlessness whereby he went astray, — sor- 
rowful at his defeat. But he remembers the manly 
part of him, and with new resolutions braces him- 
self for new trials. He thinks of the powers that 
lie unused in his own nature. He looks out at 
the examples of lofty men, his soul is stirred to 
its deeper depths. A new image of beauty rises, 
living, from that troubled sea, and the Ideal of 
human loveliness is folded in his arms, " This 
fair Ideal,'' says he, " shall be mine. I also will 
be as whole and beautiful. Ah, me ! how can 
I ever get such lovely life ? " Then he thinks of 
the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Justice, the Eter- 
nal Love, the Eternal Holiness, which surrounds 
him, and now fills up his consciousness, waiting 
to bless. He reaches out his arms towards that 
Infinite Motherliness which created him at first 
and preserved him ever since ; which surpassed 
when he fell short, furnishing the great plan of his 



384 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



life and the world's life, and is of all things per- 
fect Cause and Providence. Then, deeply roused 
in every part, he communicates with the Infinite 
Mind and Conscience, Heart and Soul. He is 
made calmer by the thought of the immense tran- 
quillity which enfolds the nervous world in its all- 
embracing, silent arms. He is comforted by the 
motherly aspect of that Infinite Eye, which never 
slumbers in its watch over the suffering of each 
great and every little thing, converting it all to 
good. He is elevated to confidence in himself, 
when he feels so strong the never-ending love 
w T hich makes, sustains, and guides the world of 
matter, beasts, and men ; makes from perfect mo- 
tives, sustains with perfect providence, and guides 
by perfect love to never-ending bliss. Yea, the 
tranquillity, pity, love, of the Infinite Mother enters 
into his soul, and he is tranquil, soothed, and strong 
once more. He has held communion with his 
God, and the Divine has given of the Deity's own 
kind. His artistic fancy and his plastic hand have 
found an Apollo in that pliant human block. 

That is a prayer. I paint the process out in 
words, — they are not my prayer itself, only the 
cradle of my blessed heavenly babe. I paint it 
not in words, — it is still my prayer, not less the 
aspiration of my upward-flying soul. I carry my 
child cradled only in my arms. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



385 



I have this experience in my common and daily- 
life, with no unusual grief to stir, or joy to quicken, 
or penitence to sting me into deep emotion: then 
my prayer is only a border round my daily life, to 
keep the web from ravelling away through constant 
use and wear ; or else a fringe of heaven, where- 
by I beautify my common consciousness and daily 
work. 

But there strikes for me a greater hour ; some 
new joy binds me to this, or puts another genera- 
tion into my arms ; another heart sheds its life 
into my own ; some great sorrow sends me in 
upon myself and God ; out of the flower of self- 
indulgence the bee of remorse stings me into 
agony. And then I rise from out my common 
consciousness, and take a higher, wider flight into 
the vast paradise of God, and come back laden 
from the new and honeyed fields wherein I have a 
newer and a fresher life and sweeter communings 
with loftier loveliness than I had known before. 
Thus does the man, that will, hold commune with 
his Father, face to face, and get great income from 
the Soul of all. 

In all this there is nothing miraculous ; there has 
been no change on God's part, but a great change 
on man's. We have received what He is univer- 
sally giving. So in winter it is clear and cold, 
the winds are silent, clouds gather over the city's 

33 



386 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



face, and all is still. How cold it is ! In a few 
hours the warmth steals out from the central fire, 
— the earth's domestic, household hearth ; the 
clouds confine it in, those airy walls, that it flee 
not off, nor spread to boundless space ; the frost 
becomes the less intense, and men are gladdened 
with the milder day. So, when magnetic bars in 
time have lost their force, men hang them up in 
the line of the meridian, and the great loadstone, 
the earth, from her own breast, restores their faded 
magnetism. Thus is it that human souls com- 
municate with the great central Fire and Light 
of all the world, the loadstone of the universe, and 
thus recruit, grow young again, and so are blessed 
and strong. 

There may be a daily, conscious communion 
with God, marked by reverence, gratitude, aspi- 
ration, trust, and love ; it will not be the highest 
prayer. 

" 'T is the most difficult of tasks to keep 
Heights that the soul is competent to gain." 

And the highest prayer is no common event in a 
man's life. Ecstasy, rapture, great delight in 
prayer, or great increase in life thereby, — they are 
the rarest things in the life of any man. They 
should be rare. The tree blossoms but once a 
year; blooms for a week, and then fulfils and ma- 
tures its fruit in the long months of summer and 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



387 



of harvest-time, — fruit for a season, and seed for 
many an age. 

The sun is but a moment at meridian. Jesus 
had his temptation but once, but once his agony, 
— the two foci round which his life's beauteous el- 
lipse was drawn. The intensest consciousness of 
friendship does not last long. They say men have 
but once the ecstasy of love ; human nature could 
not bear such a continual strain. So all the blos- 
somings of rapture must needs be short. The 
youthful ecstasy of love leads man and maid by 
moonlight up the steep, sheer cliffs of life, " w T hile 
all below, the world in mist lies lost " ; then, in the 
daylight of marriage they walk serenely on, along 
the high table-land of mortal life, and though con- 
tinually greatening their connubial love and joy, it 
is without the early ecstasy. 

Men sometimes seek to have their daily prayer 
high and ecstatic as their highest hour and walk 
with God ; it cannot be ; it should not be. Some 
shut themselves up in convents to make religion 
their business, — all their life ; to make an act of 
prayer their only act. They always fail; their re- 
ligion dwindles into ritual service, and no more ; 
their act of prayer is only kneeling with the knees 
and talking talk with windy tongues. A Method- 
ist, in great ecstasy of penitence or fear, becomes 
a member of a church. He all at once is filled 



388 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



with rapturous delight ; religious joy blossoms in 
his face, and glitters in his eye. How glad is the 
converted man ! 

" Then when he kneels to meditate, 
Sweet thoughts come o'er his soul, 
Countless, and bright, and beautiful, 
Beyond his own control." 

But by and by his rapture dies away, and he 
is astonished that he has no such ecstasy as be- 
fore. He thinks that he has "fallen from grace," 
has " grieved away " the Holy Ghost, and tries by 
artificial excitement to bring back what will not 
come without a new occasion. Certain religious 
convictions once made my heart spring in my 
bosom. Now it is not so. The fresh leaping of 
the heart will only come from a fresh conquest of 
new truth. The old man loves his wife a thou- 
sand times better than when, for the first time, he 
kissed her gracious mouth ; but his heart burns no 
longer as when he first saw his paradise in her 
reciprocating eye. The tree of religious conscious- 
ness is not in perpetual blossom,- — but now in leaf, 
now flower, now fruit. 

It is a common error to take no heed of this 
voluntary communion with God, to live intent on 
business or on pleasure, careful, troubled about 
many things, and seldom heed the one thing need- 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



389 



ed most ; to take that as it comes. If all this mor- 
tal life turned out just as we wished it, this error 
would be still more common ; only a few faculties 
would get their appropriate discipline. Men walk- 
ing only on a smooth and level road use the same 
muscles always, and march like mere machines. 
But disappointment comes on us. Sorrow checks 
our course, and we are forced to think and feel, — 
must march now up hill, and then down, shifting 
the strain from part to part. In mere prosperity 
most men are contented to enlarge their estate, their 
social rank, their daily joy, and lift their children's 
faces to the vulgar level of the vulgar flood where- 
on their fathers float. There comes some new ad- 
venture to change and mend all this. Now it is 
a great joy, success not looked for, — some kindred 
soul is made one with us, and on the pinions of 
instinctive connubial love we fly upwards and 
enlarge our intercourse with God, — the object of 
passion a communion angel to lead the human 
soul to a higher seat in the universe and a more 
intimate acquaintance with the Soul of all. Some- 
times the birth of a new immortal into our arms 
does this, and on the pinions of instinctive affec- 
tion men soar up to heaven and bring back heal- 
ing on their wings, — the object of affection the 
communion angel to convey and welcome them 
to heaven. 

33* 



390 



COMMUNION WITH GOD, 



Sometimes it is none of these, but sorrow, grief, 
and disappointment that do this. I set my heart 
upon a special thing; — it is not mine, or if I get 
the honor, the money, the social rank I sought, it 
was one thing in my eye and another in my grasp. 
The one bird which I saw in the bush was worth 
ten like that I hold in my hand. The things I 
loved are gone, — the maid, the lover, husband, 
wife, or child; the mortal is taken from longing 
arms. The heart looks up for what can never die. 
Then there is a marriage and a birth, not into 
your arms, but out of them and into heaven ; and 
the sorrow and the loss stir you to woo and win 
that Object of the soul which cannot pass away. 
Your sorrow takes you on her wings, and you go 
up higher than before ; higher than your success, 
higher than friendship's daily wing ascends; higher 
than your early love for married mate had ever 
borne you up ; higher than the delight in your 
first-born child or latest born. You have a new 
communion with your Father, and get a great 
amount of inspiration from Him. 

This is the obvious use of such vicissitudes, and 
seems a portion of their final cause. In the arti- 
ficial, ecclesiastical life of monasteries, men aim to 
reproduce this part of nature's discipline, and so 
have times of watching, fasting, bodily torture. 
But in common life such discipline asks not our 
consent to come. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



391 



As I look over your faces and recall the person- 
al history of those I know, I see how universal is 
this disappointment. But it has not made you 
more melancholy and less manly men ; life is not 
thereby the less a blessing, and the more a load. 
With no sorrows you would be more sorrowful. 
For all the sorrows that man has faithfully con- 
tended with, he shall sail into port deeper fraught 
with manliness. The wife and mother at thirty 
years of age imprisoned in her chair, her hands all 
impotent to wipe a tear away, does not suffer for 
nothing. She has thereby been taught to taste 
the fruits of sweeter communion with her God. 
These disappointments are rounds in the ladder 
whereby we climb to heaven. 

In cities there is less to help us communicate 
with God than in the fields. These walls of brick 
and stone, this artificial ground we stand on, all re- 
mind us of man ; even the city horse is a machine. 
But in the country it is God's ground beneath our 
feet ; God's hills on every side ; his heaven, broad, 
blue, and boundless, overhead ; and every bush 
and every tree, the morning song of earliest birds, 
the chirp of insects at midday, the solemn stillness 
of the night, and the mysterious hosts of stars that 
all night long climb up the sky, or silently go down, 
— these continually affect the soul, and cause us 
all to feel the Infinite Presence, and draw near to 



392 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



that; and earth seems less to rest in space than in 
the love of God. So, in cities, men build a great 
church, — at London, Paris, Venice, or at Rome, — 
seeking to compensate for lack of the natural ad- 
monitions of the woods and sky ; and, to replace 
the music of the fields and nature's art, enlist the 
painters plastic hand and the musician's sweetest 
skill. 



All that seek religion are in search for com- 
munion with God. What is there between Him 
and thee ? Nothing but thyself. Each can have 
what inspiration each will take. God is continu- 
ally giving; He will not withhold from you or me. 
As much ability as He has given, as much as you 
have enlarged your talent by manly use, so much 
will He fill with inspiration. I hold up my little 
cup. He fills it full. If yours is greater, rejoice 
in that, and bring it faithfully to the same urn. 
He who fills the violet with beauty, and the sun 
with light, — who gave to Homer his gift of song, 
such reason to Aristotle, and to Jesus the manly 
gifts of justice and the womanly grace of love and 
faith in Him, — will not fail to inspire also you and 
me. Were your little cup to become as large as 
the Pacific sea, He still would fill it full. 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



393 



There is such a thing as having a godly heart, a 
desire to conform to the ideal of man in all things, 
and to be true to Him that is " of all Creator and 
Defence/' He who has that is sure of conscious 
spiritual communion with the Father ; sure to 
find his character enlarging in every manly part ; 
sure to be supplied with unexpected growth, and 
to hold more of the Divine ; sure of the voluntary 
inspiration which is proper to the self-conscious 
man. 

There are continual means of help even for men 
that dwell hedged up in towns. There are always 
living voices which can speak to us. A good 
book helps one; this feeds his soul for a time on 
the fair words of David, Paul, or John, Taylor, A 
Kempis, Wordsworth, Emerson ; that, on the life 
of him who gives a name to Christendom. He 
who has more than I, will help me; him that has 
less, I shall help. Some men love certain solemn 
forms, as aids to their devotion ; I hope that they 
are helped thereby, — that baptism helps the 
sprinkler or the wet ; that circumcision aids the 
Jew, and sacrifice the heathen who offers it. But 
these are not the communion, only at most its 
vehicle. Communion is the meeting of the finite 
and the Infinite. 

If a man have a truly pious soul, then his 
whole inward, outward life will at length become 



394 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



religion ; for the disposition to be true to God's 
law will appear the same in his business as in his 
Sunday vow. His whole work will be an act of 
faith, he will grow greater, better, and more re- 
fined by common life, and hold higher communion 
with the Ever- Present ; the Sun of righteousness 
will beautify his every day. 

God is partial to no one, foreign to none. Did he 
inspire the vast soul of Moses, — the tender hearts 
of lowly saints in every clime and every age ? He 
waits to come down on you and me, a continual 
Pentecost of inspiration. Here in the crowded 
vulgar town, everywhere, is a Patmos, a Sinai, a 
Gethsemane ; the Infinite Mother spreads wide 
her arms to fold us to that universal breast, ready 
to inspire your soul. God's world of truth is 
ready for your intellect; His ocean of justice waits 
to flow in upon your conscience; and all His 
heaven of love broods continually by night and day 
over each heart and every soul. From that dear 
bounty shall we all be fed. The Motherly Love 
invites us all, — as much communion as we will, 
as much inspiration as our gifts and faithfulness 
enable us to take. He is not far from any one of us. 
Shall we not all go home, — the prodigal rejoice 
with him that never went astray ? Even the con- 
sciousness of sin brings some into nearness with 
the Father, tired of their draff and husks ; and then 



COMMUNION WITH GOD. 



395 



it is a blessed sin. Sorrow also brings some, 
and then it is a blessed grief ; joy yet others, and 
then it is blessed thrice. In this place is one 
greater than the temple, greater than all temples ; 
for the human nature of the lowliest child tran- 
scends all human history. And we may live so 
that all our daily life shall be a continual approach 
and mounting up towards God. What is the 
noblest life ? Not that born in the most famous 
place, acquiring wealth and fame and rank and 
power over matter and over men ; but that which, 
faithful to itself continually, holds communion with 
the Infinite, and, thence receiving of God's kind, 
in mortal life displays the truth, the justice, holi- 
ness, and love of God. 

" O, blessed be our trials then, 
This deep in which we lie ; 
And blessed be all things that teach 
God's dear Infinity.'' 



THE END, 



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